Three days before the official end of the US combat mission in Iraq, US President Barack Obama said yesterday Iraq was now a “sovereign” nation free to determine its own destiny.
“On Tuesday, after more than seven years, the United States of America will end its combat mission in Iraq and take an important step forward in responsibly ending the Iraq war,” Obama said in his weekly radio address.
The president, who is spending his last full vacation day yesterday on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, is to deliver on Tuesday a nationally-televised Oval Office address on Iraq.
“As a candidate for this office, I pledged I would end this war,” he said yesterday. “As president, that is what I am doing. We have brought home more than 90,000 troops since I took office.”
US troop numbers in Iraq fell below 50,000 last Tuesday in line with Obama’s instructions as part of a “responsible drawdown” of troops, seven years on from the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.
American troop levels are now less than a third of the peak figure of around 170,000 during the US military ‘surge’ of 2007, when Iraq was in the midst of a brutal Shiite-Sunni sectarian war that cost thousands of lives.
But more than 4,400 US servicemen and women have lost their lives in this war since it began in 2003, according to an AFP count based on data from www.icasualties.org, an independent website.
And violence in the country, while down from the worst levels seen at the height of sectarian strife, continues to threaten stability in the nation, spooking investors, terrorising religious minorities and raising the spectre of a return to chaos after the end of US combat operations.
Particularly vulnerable are the Sunni Arab militiamen who sided with American soldiers against Al-Qaeda but now fear a surge in bloody revenge attacks against them. The fighters have already been targeted in a number of attacks, including three killed Friday night in northern Iraq.
The US combat mission in Iraq is to officially end on August 31. The remaining US troops, who will have a support and training mission, are scheduled to leave the country by the end of 2011.