| Page 2 of 2 < |
Maliki Sees Sunni Bloc Rejoining Government
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Also on Thursday, the U.S. military said two U.S. soldiers were killed Wednesday when their vehicle rolled over in Salahuddin province.
The military, meanwhile, has agreed with an Iraqi government determination that Iraqi security forces will need to grow overall to between 600,000 and 646,000 by 2010 to field a force "capable of protecting the country against internal threats and insurgency," according to an interim report released Thursday by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
That would require as many as 76,000 recruits beyond the 570,000 currently authorized in the Iraqi police, army and special operations. This does not include a second generation of forces needed to protect Iraq from external threats, Bowen added.
The new report also reflects changing numbers in the Iraqi police forces, managed by the Interior Ministry.
The number of police officers trained as of Jan. 1 was 155,250, or 20,000 less than previously reported, because some trainees had been double-counted. The number of officers recruited, put on the payroll and assigned to duty is 275,300.
Iraqi police training facilities cannot handle that number and the situation is expected to get worse, Bowen said, because U.S. officials are pushing the Iraqi government also to take on 19,000 Sons of Iraq -- the locally recruited and largely Sunni security forces supported by the United States.
The U.S. military also said the number of Iraqi soldiers present for duty as of this month was 70 percent of those assigned, above the "half to two-thirds" noted in Bowen's report.
Special correspondents Naseer Nouri and Zaid Sabah in Baghdad and staff writer Walter Pincus in Washington contributed to this report.
