Iraqis ready to fight in Baghdad security push?

updated 7:54 a.m. ET Feb. 2, 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. Army engineers have torn down houses and surrounded the newly cleared space with razor wire atop concrete blast walls for neighborhood bases, the first outward signs of the coming Baghdad security crackdown.

American and Iraqi commanders are pulling together a force that numbers — on paper at least — about 90,000 troops for what many see as a last-chance drive to curb the debilitating violence that has turned Baghdad into a battleground and killed — according to the United Nations — more than 34,000 civilians last year alone.

“This will be a difficult mission and time is not on our side,” Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who will soon take over the U.S. command in Iraq, said in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.

In the past eight months, two U.S.-Iraqi security missions have failed to rout gunmen, bombers, suicide attackers and the death squads that haunt Baghdad’s streets after dark. The U.S. military blamed Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government for its inability to muster sufficient troops.

Of the 90,000-troop force now assembling for a new try at calming the capital, more than half were to be Iraqi soldiers and police, a large majority of whom are Shiite Muslims.

Shiites battling Shiites
It remains an open question whether those forces will be any more inclined this time to battle heavily armed fellow Shiite militiamen or Sunni insurgents, including al-Qaida in Iraq and its suicide bombers.

AP

This operation to sweep the capital of Sunni insurgents and Shiite militiamen was widely expected to begin early this month. But a senior Iraqi general told The Associated Press this week that “preparations are not complete.”

The general refused to say how many of an expected influx of about 8,000 Iraqi forces had arrived — as advertised — from the Kurdish north, the Shiite south or Fallujah, in the insurgent stronghold of Anbar province west of Baghdad.

Local commanders, however, said only about 2,000 of the additional troops had reached Baghdad or were nearby. The general and the commanders all spoke on condition of anonymity because of security reasons.

The Baghdad security plan, announced Jan. 6 by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and four days later by President Bush, includes an infusion of 21,500 additional American troops to Iraq, 17,500 of them to Baghdad.

The U.S. Congress, with a new Democratic majority, has been embroiled for weeks in debate about sending more Americans to a conflict that already has stretched to nearly four years and taken the lives of nearly 3,100 U.S. service members and hundreds more American contract workers.

And departing U.S. commander Gen. George Casey told a Senate panel Thursday he didn’t think such a large additional force was necessary.

“I believe that the job in Baghdad, as it’s designed now, can be done with less than that,” Casey said. “But having the flexibility to have the other three brigades on a deployment cycle gives us and gives Gen. Petraeus great flexibility.”

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