Reuters - Arab News

BAGHDAD, 2 February 2004 — US forces plan to reduce their visible presence inside Baghdad in the coming months by moving to the perimeter of the city, leaving the main responsibility for security to Iraqi forces, officials said yesterday.

US occupying forces come under daily attack in Iraq and the compound housing the US-led administration in Baghdad has come under mortar attack on several occasions. A suicide bomber killed at least 25 people at a gate to the compound last month.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who arrived in Iraq yesterday, met military commanders on his third postwar visit to the country to see the situation on the ground and be briefed on plans for a massive rotation of forces in and out of Iraq.

By May there was expected to be a complete turnover of troops, but the numbers will be similar at about 110,000.

The 1st Armored Division is building six base camps on the edge of the city which will be taken over by the 1st Cavalry Division, “so that when our successors came in behind us they would be on the outside looking in. We were very much on the inside looking out,” Brig. Gen.Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, told reporters with Wolfowitz.

When he took command in July there were 60 base camps through the city. “It comes along with sandbags, concrete barriers, concertina wire, and it just causes a lot of disruption that we are beyond now,” he said.

“So we’ll be on the perimeter of the city.”

Currently there are 24 base camps in Baghdad and that will be reduced to eight by about May, two of which will still be in the Green Zone, a sprawling and heavily fortified area inside Baghdad including one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.

The United States plans to hand over sovereignty to Iraqis by the end of June, but security continues to be a major issue.

An American soldier has died after succumbing to injuries sustained in a bomb attack in Iraq, the US military said yesterday.

The soldier was injured by an improvised explosive device which detonated on Jan. 27 and died four days later, a statement said, without elaborating on the location of the attack. The death pushes to 250 the number of US soldiers killed in combat in Iraq since US President George W. Bush declared an end to hostilities on May 1.

Meanwhile, the interim leadership will tomorrow begin drafting, under the presidency of a Sunni Islamist, a transitional law to regulate government from July 2004 to December 2005.

Mohsen Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, an organization close to the international Muslim Brotherhood movement, yesterday took over the rotating presidency of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council.

The presidency of the council, appointed in July, rotates every month. In January, it was held by Adnan Pachachi.

On Saturday, a leading Shiite member of the council, Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, said the body will “begin on Tuesday studying a draft of the fundamental law.”

Under the Nov. 15 agreement between the Governing Council and the US-led coalition, the law should be completed before end-February.

The agreement says the law should be drafted in close cooperation with the coalition and should guarantee freedom of speech and belief, and equal rights regardless of sex, religion and ethnicity.

It should affirm the independence of the judicial system, arrangements for a federal state and civilian control over the armed forces. Shiite scholars have demanded that it mention Islam as the state religion. The law cannot be modified during the transitional period.