The flare-up in violence in Shiite areas of southern Iraq and Baghdad has yet to alter U.S. plans to withdraw more combat forces this spring, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday.
Gates, speaking to reporters traveling with him from Belgium to Denmark, offered a mildly upbeat assessment of the Iraqi government’s military intervention in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
Rockets fell on the Green Zone in Baghdad on Monday and random machine gun fire rang out in Basra as Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr sought to rein in his militia after a week of battles that claimed about 400 lives.
The peace deal between al-Sadr and Iraqi government forces — said to have been brokered in Iran — calmed the violence but left the cleric’s Mahdi Army intact and Iraq’s U.S.-backed prime minister politically battered and humbled within his own Shiite power base.
Gates was asked whether the higher levels of violence might change the plan to continue withdrawing Army brigades from Iraq this spring.
Of the five extra brigades that President Bush ordered to Iraq last year, two have departed and the other three are scheduled to go home between April and the end of July.
“I have not heard anything along those lines,” Gates said, adding that there would be “more finality” to that question when Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, returns to Washington to report to Congress on April 8.
There are now 158,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. By the end of July that number is supposed to fall to 140,000.
An American soldier was killed Monday by a roadside bomb in northeastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said without specifying whether the attack occurred in a Shiite or Sunni area. The military also said a U.S. soldier wounded south of Baghdad on March 23 died Sunday in Germany.
U.S. military death
The latest identification reported by the U.S. military of personnel killed in Iraq:
The remains of Army Sgt. Keith M. Maupin, 20, Batavia, Ohio; were found in Iraq, the military confirmed Sunday; assigned to the 724th Transportation Company, Bartonville, Ill. Maupin was listed as missing-captured since April 9, 2004.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
