US Vice President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the US troop withdrawal from Iraq by the end of the year opened a new phase in relations between the two countries, including a robust security partnership. The remaining 13,000 US troops in Iraq are scheduled to leave by the end of the year when a bilateral security pact expires, nearly nine years after the US invasion that ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.
"We are embarking on a new... and a comprehensive relationship between the United States and Iraq as sovereign partners," Biden said after meeting with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and other Iraqi officials. Violence in Iraq has fallen sharply since the height of the sectarian slaughter in 2006-2007, and Maliki leads a fragile power-sharing government that still struggles to balance the interests of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish political blocs.
US President Barack Obama announced last month that US troops would come home at the end of the year as scheduled after talks to keep a small number of American soldiers in Iraq as trainers fell apart over the issue of immunity. US officials had asked for around 3,000 US troops to stay in Iraq, but Maliki's government did not have the political capital to push any agreement on immunity through parliament.
Around 200 US trainers will be attached to the embassy's Office of Security Co-operation in Iraq and 700 civilian trainers will help Iraqi forces train on new US military hardware they have purchased such as F-16 fighters and Abrams tanks. "No doubt, US forces have a role in providing training for Iraqi forces," Maliki said at the end of the meeting of a bilateral co-ordinating committee. "The relationship we establish today is based on the will of two countries."
Biden's visit spotlights the fulfilment of a key pledge by Obama as he campaigns for re-election in 2012, bringing an end to an unpopular war when most Americans are focussed on the economy and jobs back home. For many Iraqis, though, withdrawal brings mixed reactions.
Many remember abuses committed by US troops and civilian contractors during the most violent years of the country's conflict. But the US pullout is also viewed with apprehension by Iraqis worried about a surge in sectarian tensions once the buffer of an American military presence is gone. Hundreds of supporters of anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr protested peacefully against Biden's visit in the mainly Shi'ite southern cities of Najaf and Basra, and in the cleric's stronghold in the Sadr City neighbourhood in Baghdad.
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