The new commander of American forces in Baghdad plans to increase the number of local garrisons across the Iraqi capital even as US troop levels drop in the coming months.
Moving soldiers out of relatively safe bases and into Baghdad's dangerous streets was a key element in the counter- insurgency strategy implemented by the commander of US forces, General David Petraeus, when he arrived a year ago.
The tactic has been vital to the US military's goal of not just clearing neighbourhoods of militants but then holding them. Major-General Jeffery Hammond told foreign journalists on Tuesday that he had a total of 75 joint security stations and combat outposts in Baghdad and planned to add another dozen of each from now until June.
US forces live and operate with Iraqi forces in such garrisons. "I'm extending our reach even further than what it is now to be less predictable and to push ourselves into locations where maybe in the past we didn't go before," Hammond said. "I don't want there to be any place in Baghdad where al Qaeda or anyone else can start to take hold because we've ignored that particular (area)."
Hammond said at least two joint security stations were being set up now in Baghdad where he believed there was an al Qaeda "nerve". He declined to give the location. The US military calls Sunni Islamist al Qaeda the greatest threat to peace in Iraq. US commanders have previously said there was no place in Baghdad where al Qaeda had a foothold.
Most of the 30,000 extra troops sent to Iraq last year were deployed in Baghdad, which was the epicentre of sectarian bloodletting between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs in 2006 and early 2007. Hammond, who assumed his post last month, described the change in the city's security conditions as "remarkable".
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