U.S. WANTS TO STAY IN IRAQ; Vicious battles as Sunnis hit Qaeda

BAGHDAD (Agencies): Ten people were killed and 30 wounded in a militant mortar attack on a Shi’ite district in southwestern Baghdad after nightfall on Friday, police said. Police said three houses were severely damaged and seven cars destroyed in the attack on the Um al-Maamlif district. Mortar attacks have become increasingly common in Baghdad as a major security crackdown by thousands of US and Iraqi troops makes it difficult for militants to move about. Sunni tribal fighters, American troops and nationalist insurgents were all in action against al-Qaeda’s Islamist militants in vicious street battles in west Baghdad on Friday. Sunni militants, who would once have sympathised with al-Qaeda’s war against US and Iraqi government troops, have instead this week been shooting it out with the Islamist extremists in the lawless Amiriyah neighbourhood. US and Iraqi government security forces have also piled into the fight. “Planned security operations in cooperation with Iraqi security forces were conducted today based on intelligence gained from local leaders and citizens of the area,” said US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl. These official units also have a shadowy new ally in the battle, according to the commander of a Sunni tribal militia. “We dispatched around 50 of our secret police from Anbar to Amiriyah, and started to hit al-Qaeda there. We killed a lot of them,” Sheikh Hamid al-Hais, the head of the Anbar Salvation Council, said in a telephone interview. “A similar operation will be launched in Al-Ghazaliyah against al-Qaeda today. We have sufficient information on places they are in, and we will punish them,” he said, adding that his forces were fighting in plain clothes. The Salvation Council is the armed wing of an alliance of Sunni sheikhs from the western Anbar province, where they have funnelled tribal gunmen into the Iraqi security forces in order to fight al-Qaeda extremists. Many of these Sunni militants are former insurgents once hostile to the US military and Baghdad’s Shiite-led government but, angered by al-Qaeda’s attacks on civilians and tribal leaders, they have now changed sides.
US commanders see this as one of the most positive recent developments in Iraq, which is in the grip of vicious series of overlapping civil conflicts, and hope now to persuade former insurgent groups to join a peace process. Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the number two US officer in Iraq, told reporters on Thursday that about four-fifths of the militants currently fighting American forces were thought to be ready to end their campaigns. “So we want to reach back to them,” he said. “And we’re talking about ceasefires and maybe signing some things that say they won’t conduct operations against the government of Iraq or against coalition forces.”
Amiriyah, however, was still far from peaceful as the political shifts played themselves out in the form of bloody street battles. Iraqi security officials said fighting had decreased since Thursday, but was continuing. “A curfew has been in effect in Amiriyah for about 10 days from 8:00 pm to 6:00 am. The curfew was set by the Iraqi security forces to disrupt the enemy’s ability to reinforce the area,” said US Lieutenant Colonel John Reynolds. Residents said the curfew had not prevented fighting from erupting. “Yesterday morning, heavy fighting started in the main streets of Amiriyah using lots of different kinds of weapons between Islamic Army and 1920 Brigades on one hand and the Islamic State on the other,” said resident Raed Mohammed.
The Islamic Army and the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution are nationalist insurgent groups run by former supporters of Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime, while the Islamic State of Iraq is an al-Qaeda-led Islamist alliance. “We want the Iraqi government to save us and to kill those criminals. We can’t leave our homes to get the injured and dead to the hospitals. I saw bodies in the streets,” Mohammed, a civil servant, told AFP by telephone. Amiriyah was once one of Sunni west Baghdad’s most upscale districts, where streets of generous detached homes are lined by palm trees and bougainvilleas, but in the past year has been one of the city’s fiercest battlefields. Businessman Abdel Aziz al-Issawi said the area was currently in a state of siege. “There’s no electricity, no water, just fear and the cries of children.” In the southwest corner of the capital, Sunni and Shiite tensions played out with a mortar attack on a popular market place at nightfall that killed 12 people and wounded 40, a doctor at Baghdad’s Yarmuk hospital said. Mortar duels between rival neighbourhoods are common in the restive capital and one person was killed and three wounded in a similar bombardment of the north Baghdad suburb of Saba al-Bur on Friday. In nearby Khadra, a roadside bomb killed on person and wounded two others, security officials said. Last month, 1,951 civilians were killed in violence, 30 percent more than in April and close to the death toll for March, officials said, citing figures collated by the defence, interior and health ministries.

Presence
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday the United States is looking to a long-term military presence in Iraq under a mutually agreed arrangement similar to that it has long had with South Korea. Gates told reporters here that plans still call for an assessment of the US “surge” strategy in September, but he was looking beyond that to the type of military presence the United States will have in Iraq over the long term. “What I’m thinking in terms of is a mutual agreement where some force of Americans — mutually agreed with mutually agreed missions — is present for a protracted period of time,” he said. Gates, who was visiting the US Pacific Command here on the way to security talks in Singapore, pointed to South Korea, contrasting it to Vietnam “where we just left lock, stock and barrel.” US troops have been in South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, with US generals in charge of combined US-South Korean forces in time of war. “The idea is more a model of a mutually agreed arrangement whereby we have a long and enduring presence but under the consent of both parties and under certain conditions,” he said. “The Korea model is one, the security relationship we have with Japan is another,” he said. President George W. Bush also has alluded to the strategy shift in talking about a “Plan B-H,” that would incorporate recommendations from a commission head by former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton. The Baker-Hamilton Commission proposed a phased reduction in US forces but leaving a small force to protect Iraq’s borders and fight al-Qaeda. At the same time, Gates said US military commanders should not feel constrained by political pressure in Washington for a decision in September on whether to begin reducing US troop levels in Iraq. Currently, there are about 147,000 US troops in Iraq but the total is expected to swell to about 160,000 over the next months. Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the number two commander in Iraq, earlier told reporters in Washington via video link from Baghdad that he may not be able to make a full assessment by September of whether the buildup is succeeding in stabilizing Iraq.
“We’ve made small progress here. We have not made the progress that I think is necessary yet, but I hope over the summer that we will continue to make progress,” Odierno said. “The assessment might be, ‘I need a little more time.’ The assessment might be, ‘I’ve seen enough, and it’s effective’ or ‘I’ve seen enough and it’s not going to be effective.’ “Right now if you asked me, I would tell you I’ll probably need a little bit more time to do a true assessment,” he said.
Odierno said last month that the extra troops will be needed at least through early next year.
Asked about Odierno’s latest comments, Gates said, “I don’t think the goal post has changed really at all.” “I think he was saying basically that report can go a number of different ways, one of which is ‘I need a little bit more time.’” “When we receive the report from General (David) Petraeus and General Odierno we want them to focus on what is going on in Iraq,” he said. Petraeus is the top US commander in Iraq. “Our military commanders should not have to worry about the Washington clock. That is for us in Washington to worry about,” he said.