Combat Brigade To Leave Iraq

BAGHDAD, Oct. 17 -- The U.S. military intends to reduce the number of combat brigades in Iraq from 20 to 19 by the end of this year, the first part of a plan to withdraw thousands of American troops from the war zone by next summer, military officials said Wednesday.

The drawdown will begin when the 1st Cavalry Division's 3rd Brigade Combat Team, deployed in restive Diyala province, leaves in December and is not replaced, officials said. They said a neighboring unit would assume responsibility for the northern province, they said.

"There is not another surge unit coming in behind" the Diyala brigade, said Col. Jon Lehr, commander of the neighboring unit, the 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 2nd Infantry Division. "We are moving over there to take the larger portion of the mission set, which is the remainder of the Diyala province, which is absolutely huge. It's about the size of Maryland."

The troop movements are the first steps of a plan by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, to reduce the number of combat brigades from 20 to 15 by next summer. Pentagon officials said it remained unclear which areas of the country would experience a reduction in U.S. troops.

Officials said the redeployments would not reduce troop levels in Diyala, a province just north of Baghdad that has been the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between U.S. troops and Sunni Arab insurgents.

In an interview, Maj. Gen. Benjamin R. Mixon, the commander of forces in northern Iraq, said another brigade would eventually be sent to replace the Stryker brigade covering for the departed unit in Diyala. He said Petraeus's plan would not lead to a reduction of the 23,000 or so troops and five combat brigades in the northern part of the country.

"We definitely are not going to let up on the enemy anytime soon by having less combat power" in northern Iraq, he said.

He stressed in particular that there would be no reduction of forces in Diyala province, which he called "the place where we've had the hardest fighting over the past couple of months."

Mixon would not discuss when the replacement unit would arrive in the north, citing security concerns. Pentagon officials said they expected that a unit originally scheduled to deploy to Iraq now would instead go in the spring, though they cautioned that those plans and other moves could change.

Pentagon officials said other brigades in Iraq would fill the gaps left after units depart by redrawing and expanding the areas for which they are responsible.

"I do think this is good news," Lehr said during a conference call with bloggers. "I believe, at the tactical level, the surge is accomplishing what it's supposed to."

He added: "I don't want to paint the picture that it's, you know, a stroll in the park anymore. No, it's still a dangerous environment, but it is significantly more secure than it was just a month or two ago."

New violence broke out in other parts of Iraq. In the southern province of Diwaniyah, seven police officers were killed when a roadside bomb exploded next to their car, according to a police spokesman.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, unidentified gunmen abducted and beheaded Mohammad Abdul Aziz al-Jubury, an investigator with the province's Commission on Integrity, an anti-corruption group, according to police Brig. Serhad Qader.

The U.S. military also announced that a soldier had been killed Sunday by small-arms fire south of Baghdad.

In Washington on Wednesday, a Pentagon spokesman said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is considering the option of placing all private security contractors in Iraq under a single authority.

Gates believes "it is worth exploring whether or not there needs to be one central entity that would at least be in charge of the mission of all armed security contractors in Iraq," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters at a briefing.

Gates intends to raise the idea soon in discussions with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Morrell said.

He denied reports that Gates and Rice are in a dispute over the issue. "They really have not had a chance to get down into this -- what may well be a thorny issue. But it's premature to describe them at odds over this."

The idea of establishing a central authority over the security contractors has arisen because of differences in the degree of accountability of Defense Department private guards and those working for the State Department and other U.S. government agencies.

Gates sent a fact-finding team to Iraq last month, and it brought back a largely negative report in which U.S. commanders complained of a serious lack of coordination with private security contractors operating in their battle space. "It's the desire of the secretary . . . to try to get a better structure in place -- command and control, accountability, visibility -- of armed contractors in Iraq," Morrell said.

White reported from Washington. Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson in Washington, special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf, Iraq, and other Washington Post staff in Iraq contributed to this report.