As the U.S. military plans a rapid troop drawdown in Iraq this summer, commanders have to decide where they’re needed most and where they should stay the longest.
The U.S. has promised to decrease troop levels from roughly 95,000 now to 50,000 by the end of August. But the military won’t draw down by a certain percentage across the board. The level of violence varies from city to city and province to province, so commanders have to make some tough calls on where to place its manpower.
I recently spent some time traveling through northern Iraq and found that security is indeed a mixed bag.
In Ninewa province, near the city of Mosul, the U.S. will likely have a strong presence for some time to come. Arab-Kurd tensions remain high, and Al-Qaeda is still trying to exploit that.
To ease the tensions, the U.S. military recently began three-party combined checkpoints and patrols across the area. Kurdish peshmerga work side by side with the mostly Arab Iraqi forces and U.S. troops. Commanders say the Americans are playing the role of an “honest broker” between Kurds and Arabs, helping their security forces to accept each other. At first, the joint patrols seemed a radical idea for this region. Lt. Col. Mohammad Khalaf of the Iraqi police says, “In the beginning some people resisted this idea. This is a very sensitive area. But the American troops are a calming force.”
South of Mosul, the city of Samarra has a much different dynamic. The U.S. military is already almost gone. Just a few dozen soldiers remain at a small outpost on the edge of town, where they work with Iraqi forces.
Samarra was once a flashpoint for violence. In 2006, insurgents bombed its Golden Mosque, one of the Shiites holiest shrines, triggering nearly two years of bloody sectarian violence. U.S. and Iraqi forces came in, clearing the city block by block.
But today, the Americans really venture into the town center. They think they’re a distraction now. So we toured the city escorted by Iraqi police. Our Fox crew rode in the back of a pickup truck with no body armor and cameras rolling. It would have been foolish two years ago. But the insurgents seem to be gone now. General Ghayath Sami of the Iraqi Army says, “The radical ideas are disappearing. The sectarian way of thinking is ending now.”
As workers reconstruct the Golden Mosque, thousands of Shiite pilgrims peacefully visit this mostly Sunni city every week. A tour group from Taiwan recently came to sightsee.
The blast walls are coming down, businesses are re-opening, and city leaders hope to rebuild restaurants and hotels to attract both religious and cultural tourism.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military has to decide how soon its safe to back out completely, from each village and city and province.