All of a Sudden, US Quickly Finds Reason to Delay Troops Withdrawal from Iraq

The political situation in Iraq has been aggravating recently on the threshold of the parliamentary elections in the country. A new outburst of violence is based on national protests since the authorities refused to register hundreds of candidates as deputies of the top legislative body.

Photo: All of a Sudden, US Quickly Finds Reason to Delay Troops Withdrawal from Iraq

Both Sunnis, who made the core of Ba’ath party (the ruling party during Saddam Hussein’s era) and Sunnis, who were persecuted by Saddam’s regime and then welcomed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, found themselves offended by the election committee.

Armed people slaughtered two Iraqi families in Baghdad last week. Eleven people, including six children, were killed. Five civilians were wounded in mortar fire in the Green Zone in Baghdad, where many embassies and governmental building are located.

Three people were killed as a result of suicide car bombing in the town of Ramadi in Iraq’s west. Nine were killed, including a six-year-old child. In Mosul, which is in the west of Iraq, two Iraqi soldiers and two policemen were killed as a result of attack against a checkpoint.

These and other incidents give the US command a reason to delay the scheduled withdrawal of troops from the war-torn country. Top US officials say that the political instability will continue after the parliamentary vote.

Obama’s administration originally planned to withdraw the troops from Iraq before September. General Odierno believes the pull out should be pushed back in case a state of emergency in the country occurs during the upcoming two or three months.

Many analysts believe that the people of Iraq will treat such a delay very negatively.

“The American presence is a disaster. We rebelled against the US occupation in 2004 and 2008. There is no help from America except for missiles that kill the Iraqis. There is no help from the Iraqi government either. Nothing from Iran, nothing from the UN, nothing from anybody,” Abu Mustafa, one of the Shiites of Baghdad, who welcomed the incursion of the US troops in Iraq in 2003 said.

“We hoped in 2003 that they would help develop Iraq for the Iraqis. The things that started happening were all made against the people of Iraq, and we rebelled against it. I can say the same about the Iraqi government, which was forced to serve America, not the people of Iraq,” Mustafa said.

In the meantime, the Iraqi government tries to win Sunnis’ loyalty before the elections. The government decided to reinstate 20,000 officers, who served in the army during Saddam Hussein’s stay at power. The Iraqi opposition believes that it is simply a pre-election trick.

Many experts say that Iraq will have to go through the situation 2005 again, when it took Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki a lot of time to form the government,

Ivan Tulyakov
Pravda.Ru

Read the original in Russian