Cabinet member calls for troop withdrawal from Iraqi cities

A member of Iraq’s new cabinet said today he wanted to see US and British soldiers pull out of Baghdad and other major cities within six months.

As more UK troops arrived in Iraq this weekend, electricity minister Ayham al-Samaraie said coalition forces should shrink away into the countryside by the beginning of next year and let the Iraqi army take over in urban areas.

Meanwhile Britain's Maj Gen Sir Patrick Cordingley, who commanded British troops in the first Gulf War, expressed concern that personnel were not being trained properly because forces were being stretched by peace-keeping demands.

Dr al-Samaraie, among the first ministers appointed to Iraq’s governing council last week, said: “I am looking to see everybody going out of the cities in a very short time.

“I am talking about the British and the American soldiers to go out of the cities in six months time and stay outside in certain places to protect the country, because the country has no soldiers to protect them.

“In three years or four years, probably we need the help, but the help would be going down and minimised to the limit when we have the Iraqi army established.

“And I think we are already in the process of putting that army together,” he told BBC1’s Breakfast With Frost.

Britain's Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon is expected to announce a new deployment of up to 3,000 troops this week.

Sir Patrick said there was now less time to train personnel because of the demands of keeping the peace in Iraq.

He told the same programme: “The trick of course is to have soldiers trained to be able to fight as they did in those first few weeks very successfully and then switching to this second operation, it is very difficult.

“The real problem that … the army has is actually keeping people trained for both these expertise, so that you can do it very quickly when it’s needed.

“The more people who get absorbed, I think there are something like 45,000 troops involved in operations at the moment, the less time you have to train them, and so you very soon get to a stage where your army isn’t trained properly, and that’s the real problem.”