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News Flash 
U.S. Military Says
2,000 Troops Leaving Iraq
By Michael Holden
3/6/2008
 BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Some 2,000
U.S. soldiers are being withdrawn from Baghdad
as part of a planned reduction of U.S. forces in
Iraq, the U.S. military said on Thursday.
The 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division,
was part of the extra 30,000 soldiers sent last
year to stop savage sectarian violence between
Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims that had threatened to
tip the country into a civil war.
"I can state that (they) are leaving and
there is no replacement brigade combat team coming
in," U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel
Steve Stover told Reuters.
Since the 30,000 troops became fully deployed
in mid-2007, violence has dropped by 60 percent,
prompting General David Petraeus, the U.S. military
commander in Iraq, to announce that five of 20
brigades would be pulled out by July 2008.
There are more than 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq,
with about 34,500 deployed in the Iraqi capital.
The drawdown is expected to cut the overall total
by about 20,000.
Last November, the first brigade, totaling about
3,000 soldiers, was sent home from Iraq without
being replaced.
Stover said the 2,000 soldiers of the 2nd Brigade
Combat Team based in northeast Baghdad were also
in the process of returning home after a 15-month
tour. They included support and service staff as
well as combat troops.
For operational reasons he could not say whether
other U.S. soldiers or Iraqi forces would fill
the gap left by the departing brigade.
But there were plans to withdraw another brigade
from the Baghdad area as part of the planned cutback,
he said, giving no details of when that would take
place.
"Plans are fluid," he said. "The
(U.S. military's intent) is not to give back any
part of the city that our soldiers have paid a
high price for."
Baghdad was the epicenter of a wave of sectarian
violence that swept Iraq after the February 2006
bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, killing
tens of thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands
of more.
Employing a new counter-insurgency strategy to
reduce the violence, U.S. forces moved out of large
bases and set up patrol bases in neighborhoods,
making them more vulnerable to attack. U.S. forces
suffered their highest number of casualties in
2007.
Petraeus and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates
have said there should be a pause after the planned
drawdown is completed in mid-2008 to assess the
situation. That would leave about 140,000 U.S.
soldiers in Iraq.
On Wednesday, Major-General Mark Hertling, commander
of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, warned that further
troop withdrawals would have to be halted unless
Iraqi authorities moved faster to create jobs and
improve basic services over the next six months.
SOURCE:
Yahoo News
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