BAGHDAD — America’s top commander in Iraq said Monday he wants to deploy U.S. soldiers alongside Iraqi and Kurdish troops in the north after a series of bombings by insurgents who hope to stoke an Arab-Kurdish conflict.
Also Monday, the Iraqi government approved a draft law to let Iraqi voters decided whether U.S. troops’ departure from the country should be speeded up.
The deployment Gen. Ray Odierno seeks would be a departure from the security pact that called for Americans to pull back from populated areas on June 30.
Odierno warned that al-Qaida in Iraq was exploiting tensions between the Iraqi army and the Kurdish militia, the peshmerga, to carry out attacks on villages not guarded by either side. The bombings have killed scores of people since Aug. 7.
The U.S. soldiers would act in an oversight role to help the troops work together to secure areas along a fault line of land claimed by both Arabs and Kurds, Odierno said.
“It won’t be for long if we do it. It’ll be just to build confidence in the forces so they’re comfortable working together, then we’ll slowly pull ourselves out,” Odierno said. “I think they just all feel more comfortable if we’re there initially.”
Odierno said he met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki earlier Monday and found him receptive to the idea.
Several top defense officials have identified the split between Iraq’s majority Arabs and the Kurdish minority as a greater long-term threat to Iraq’s stability than the Sunni-Shiite conflict.
At the heart of the dispute is the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as well as villages in Ninevah province that the Kurds want to incorporate into their semiautonomous area despite opposition from Arabs and minority Turkomen ethnic group.
Odierno said the deployment of the U.S.-Iraqi-Kurdish protection forces would start in Ninevah province, which includes the volatile city of Mosul, and then extend to Kirkuk and to Diyala province north of the capital.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government announced Monday that it intends to let voters decide in January whether the departure of U.S. troops should be accelerated. The referendum would be held during the national parliamentary election.
The measure still must be approved by parliament, which is in recess until next month.
U.S. officials have quietly lobbied the Iraqi government to suspend plans to hold the referendum, because they’re all but certain voters would annul the agreement.
If that were to happen, U.S. troops would have one year to depart, moving up their targeted December 2011 withdrawal date by almost a year.
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