Baghdad, Iraq – British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed with Iraq’s new leadership Monday that Iraqi security forces would start assuming full responsibility for some provinces and cities next month, beginning a process leading to the eventual withdrawal of all coalition forces.
Blair and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declined to set a timetable for that withdrawal, but British media quoted an unidentified senior British official traveling with Blair as saying coalition forces should be out within four years.
The British and Iraqi leaders said “responsibility for much of Iraq’s territorial security” should be “transferred to Iraqi control” by December. At that point, al-Maliki said, two of Iraq’s most violent provinces, Baghdad and Anbar, may be the last where coalition forces maintain control.
Handing over security responsibilities to the Iraqis does not necessarily mean that significant numbers of U.S.-led forces will start returning home soon. Instead, plans call for them to move from cities to large coalition bases as part of an intermediate stage where they will be on call if the Iraqis need them.
“It has been longer and harder than any of us would have wanted it to be, but this is a new beginning and we want to see what you want to see, which is Iraq and the Iraqi people able to take charge in their own destiny and to write the next chapter of Iraqi history themselves,” Blair said in the first visit by a foreign leader since al-Maliki’s government took office Saturday.
Blair now heads to Washington for talks with President Bush that are likely to focus on their overall strategy in Iraq. In Chicago, Bush acknowledged that the situation in Iraq is improving only gradually, and he urged patience with “more days of challenge and loss.”
On Monday, Blair and al-Maliki issued a joint statement saying Iraqi forces in June would begin “progressively and quickly taking on full responsibility for security from multinational forces in the cities and provinces of Iraq.”
Separately, Iraq’s Sunni Arab vice president said Iraqis had a legitimate right to resistance until coalition forces left Iraq. But Tariq al-Hashimi also called on insurgents to consider sitting down and talking to the U.S. since America was apparently seriously thinking about eventually withdrawing its forces.
Meanwhile, the relentless violence killed at least 20 people. The U.S. military said a U.S. Marine was killed in action in Anbar province Sunday.
A roadside bomb killed four policemen Monday in Musayyib, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, police said. Car bombs in two areas of the capital killed nine Iraqis and wounded 13, police said.
Elsewhere, officials said gunmen killed a police colonel in Samarra; an employee of a mobile phone company in Baqouba; the general director of the youth ministry in Baghdad; a Sunni Arab who headed the office that issues national ID cards to Iraqis in Kirkuk; and a former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party in Mosul. Police found the bodies of two men – a police captain in the capital and a man in the Madain area, southeast of Baghdad – who had been shot in captivity.
