Friday, July 28, 2006
All flights out for soldiers at the end of their service were canceled
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Military commanders in Iraq are developing a plan to move as many as 5,000 U.S. troops with armored vehicles and tanks into the country's capital in an effort to quell escalating violence, defense officials said Thursday.
As part of the plan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday extended the tours of some 3,500 members of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team. It was scheduled to be leaving now, but instead, most of its 3,900 troops will serve for up to four more months.
It was unclear whether the Stryker troops, who are in northern Iraq, would be among those going to Baghdad.
Under the plan to bolster security in Baghdad, U.S. troops would be teamed with Iraqi police and army units and make virtually every operation in the city a joint effort, one military official said. Another said movement of some troops into Baghdad had already begun.
All flights out for soldiers currently at the end of their deployment were canceled as of Tuesday, as commanders wrestled with the plan and how to supply troops needed for it, a third official said.
All spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan had not been finalized and discussions were private.
Sectarian fighting
Meanwhile, rockets and mortars rained down Thursday on an upscale, mostly Shiite area of Baghdad, collapsing an apartment house, shattering shops and killing at least 31 people.
A car bomb also exploded during the attack in the commercial-residential district of Karradah, an area that is home to several prominent Shiite politicians.
More than 150 people were wounded in the blasts, police said.
President Bush broadly outlined a plan to increase U.S. and Iraqi forces in Baghdad during Tuesday's visit to Washington by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. But little detail was provided.
Officials said it would involve shifting some U.S. forces to the capital from other locations in the country. There were about 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq on Thursday, and about 30,000 were in Baghdad prior to the new plan.
Assembling more troops and armor in Baghdad is aimed at calming violence that has only increased in the capital since mid-June, when al-Maliki launched the city's biggest security crackdown since the U.S.-led invasion.
As part of the new plan, about four companies of military police, or about 400 soldiers, are moving to Baghdad, and the remainder of a reserve force that had been in Kuwait -- equaling about another 400 troops -- has also gone into Iraq, officials said earlier this week.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to give details of the plan, saying the top commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, "is working through a very tough problem" on how to manage the security crackdown with the new resources planned.
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