Stryker team’s stay in Iraq extended

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, July 27, 2006

WASHINGTON – Defense Department officials announced Thursday that the Army’s 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, which has been deployed in Mosul, Iraq, since last summer, will be extended for as long as 120 days to boost security in Iraq’s capital, Baghdad.

The Alaska-based 172nd has been in northern Iraq, which has been relatively peaceful compared with the most restive areas of the country. But the extension means that about 3,700 troops who had been planning to return home over the next two weeks probably will remain for at least the next six weeks and possibly as long as four months, this time in the nation’s most violent area, officials said.

About 600 troops with the 172nd have already returned home, and as many as three dozen service members – mostly commissioned officers and senior noncommissioned officers – could be recalled to the war from the United States in coming days, two defense officials said.

Meanwhile the Associated Press reported that 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 – part of the rising sectarian violence President Bush has vowed to stop.

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.

Horrified survivors milled about the street hours later, surveying the damage and blaming Sunnis from neighborhoods across the Tigris river.

“We are not infidels. It seems that we are not even safe in our homes,” said one man, who, like others on the street, refused to give his name because he was afraid.