Three US soldiers killed as violence in Iraq escalates
Thursday, 26 June 2008
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Three US soldiers and an interpreter have been killed by a roadside bomb in northern Iraq, bringing to 25 the number of Americans killed in Iraq this month and underlining that Iraq remains a very dangerous place for the US army, despite a drop in the number of attacks on it.
US forces are now coming under regular attack in Shia as well as Sunni areas of Iraq with wide differences within the US government about the extent to which Iraqi security forces can operate without American assistance. There are now about 478,000 men in the Iraqi security forces, but a report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) cites the US Defence Department as saying that the proportion of Iraqi units capable of performing operations without US help is only 10 per cent.
The Iraqi government has extended its authority into areas previously held by the Mehdi Army militia of the anti-US cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Basra and Sadr City in Baghdad. But senior Iraqi officials say this would not have happened without the backing of American firepower.
The continuing opposition to the government takeover of Sadr City was illustrated earlier this week when a bomb inside the district council building killed 10 people including four Americans working to restore local government. The US has seen 4,109 members of its military killed and 29,000 wounded since it invaded Iraq in 2003.
The US is seeking to portray the new security pact with Iraq, known as the status of forces agreement (Sofa), as being negotiated at a moment when the Iraqi government is getting stronger and Iraq less violent. The number of enemy-initiated attacks fell from 180 a day last June to 50 a day in February, though they rose again thereafter, according to the GAO.
The Iraqi government and US officials are more confident about security in the country now, but the government's success at the end of the fighting with the Mehdi Army came largely because neither Mr Sadr nor the Iranian government wanted a confrontation at this time. Despite the deep differences between Washington and Tehran, both governments are strong supporters of the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The US still believes it can get a security pact agreed with Iraq by a 31 July deadline, a senior US official said yesterday. The US continues to assert it will do nothing to infringe Iraqi sovereignty, but is very unspecific about the future of the largest US bases in the country, which resemble military cities, and the length of time that the US will occupy them.
The US military only needs to retain a couple of these to remain the predominant military power in Iraq and to pose a threat to Iran, despite repeated disclaimers that the US will never use Iraq as a platform to attack any of the country's neighbours.
One US concession since negotiations on Sofa began in Baghdad is that military contractors will no longer have legal immunity from Iraqi law. This is expected to lead to a sharp fall in their numbers. US troops will continue to have immunity.
Crucial to the fate of the security pact negotiations will be the attitude of the Iranian government which has hitherto been adamantly opposed to it. It would be difficult for an Iraqi government to sign an agreement which Iran sees as turning Iraq into a US client state. A more confident Iraqi government will also have difficulty claiming it is strong enough to reassert Iraqi sovereignty, but so weak that it cannot survive without US support.
