Britain signals changed role in Iraq

BRITISH Defence Secretary John Hutton signalled yesterday there would be a “fundamental change” in Britain’s role in Iraq early next year as he made his first visit to Baghdad.

He held talks with Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki before meeting the small number of British forces stationed in the Iraqi capital.

Afterwards, he said significant progress had been made in Iraq in recent months and security was improving across the country.

“We want, in the first months of next year, to see a fundamental change in our military mission in Iraq, moving towards an increased focus on military training and education as part of a broad-based bilateral partnership,” he said.

“We agreed to work together intensively to put in place, by the end of this year, a formal agreement in relation to the status of UK forces in Iraq which will underpin this change.”

The trip comes a fortnight after Hutton, the former business secretary, was given the defence brief in Gordon Brown’s reshuffle.

Most of Britain’s 4,000-strong deployment is in Basra, in the south of the country, where Hutton is heading today. He said: “I wanted to take the opportunity to see what our people are achieving out here and to get a clear sense of the UK’s engagement with Iraq, both current and future.”

Meanwhile, Shi’ite parties in Iraq’s ruling coalition said yesterday they wanted changes made to a draft of a security pact with the US that Iraqi officials had previously described as final.

The draft, announced this past week after months of negotiations, requires US troops to leave Iraq at the end of 2011 unless Baghdad asks them to stay.