The last U.S. combat troops withdraw from Iraq faster than expected from – and leave behind a shattered country: every day attacks, a power-hungry political elite, but no government. Observers expect the outbreak of a new civil war.
Seven years and five months ago. At that time the tanks went in the opposite direction: Emblematic images showed the 2003 American supremacy, as they rolled from the Kuwaiti border with their tanks in the Iraqi desert and from there to Baghdad. So now it goes out from Iraq.
Wheeled tank of the 4th Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division passed on Thursday in the first dawn Chabari honking the border and put their tanks in the flood of TV channels from the car park. Colonel Darron Wright allowed himself a cigar, after he had brought his team from Iraq. The war is for them to end. He began on 20 March 2003. Since then, the brigade was on the heaviest fighting of the Iraq war involved and stationed in the most dangerous regions.
The soldiers that are deducted in the morning, are among the last U.S. combat troops leave Iraq – 14 days earlier than planned. Officially, no one will say so. A government spokesman denied reports about the Komplettabzug of combat troops – 6,000 soldiers would leave the country or in the next two weeks. But really all it is clear that the use is over. From the White House it was said that this type of withdrawal had to do with security.
50,000 U.S. troops remain in the country
From the peak to more than 160,000 Americans stationed in Mesopotamia, however, remain still 50,000 U.S. troops in the country – but these are no longer combatants, there are consultants and trainers. By the end of 2011, they are deducted.
In Iraq itself we are no longer sure whether to cheer the sovereignty really recovered. It is rather the fear – of what will come when the occupiers have withdrawn completely. Yet last week announced, even the highest-ranking general in Iraq, Babakir Zebari, to doubt that his men of them are grown now falling to task. “I would say to politicians: The U.S. military must stay,” Zebari said, “until the Iraqi army in 2020, completely ready.”
