U.S. commander urges lower expectations in Iraq
Source: Reuters
(Updates with additional U.S. soldier killed, U.N. official) By Claudia Parsons BAGHDAD, Jan 31 (Reuters) - The U.S. military reported four more combat deaths on Wednesday after the man tapped to take over command of U.S. forces in the Middle East said Americans may have to lower their expectations for Iraq. "What we've been doing is not working," Admiral William Fallon, nominated by President George W. Bush to become the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. "The likelihood that Iraq is suddenly going to turn into something that looks close to what we enjoy here in this country is going to be a long time coming," he said. The U.S. military said two soldiers and a Marine were killed on Tuesday in Anbar, a restive western province where they are battling a Sunni Arab insurgency. A fourth was killed on Wednesday on operations in Salah ad Din Province. Bombers and gunmen killed 40 people in attacks on Shi'ite worshippers on Tuesday and a Sunni district of Baghdad came under attack from mortars that killed at least 17 people. The deaths on the final day of the annual week-long Ashura ritual, highpoint of the Shi'ite religious calendar, underlined widespread concerns about Iraq sliding into sectarian civil war. On Wednesday, a suspected suicide bomber rammed a fuel truck into the main gate of an Iraqi army base in Miqdadiya, northeast of Baghdad, wounding at least nine people, an army source said. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in sectarian bloodshed between Shi'ites and Sunnis since an attack on a Shi'ite mosque in Samarra in February 2006. People are fleeing because there had been a dramatic increase in the number of people being killed, Stephane Jaquemet, regional representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said. The U.N. figure is 3,000 a month, "We estimate at least 1,000 people leave Iraq every day, but it's probably much more than that," the official said, estimating two million people have fled Iraq to neighbouring countries. United Nations officials describe the exodus as the biggest long-term population movement in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948. "SOLDIERS OF HEAVEN" The violence took a new direction at the weekend when Iraqi and U.S. troops battled what they said was a messianic Muslim cult calling itself the "Soldiers of Heaven" that had plotted to kill top Shi'ite clerics at the climax of Ashura. The Iraqi Defence Ministry said 263 followers of a messiah- like leader styling himself the Mahdi were killed in the fierce day-long battle near the holy city of Najaf on Saturday. But conflicting reports have made it difficult to establish exactly who the Iraqi and U.S. forces fought. Some 500 alleged cult members are under guard, with journalists kept away from the site of the fighting. The Najaf governorate said on Wednesday 95 men, all followers of the Mahdi, had been buried in numbered graves to allow for later identification if their relatives came forward. As head of U.S. Central Command, Fallon would have overall responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He would oversee Bush's plan to stabilise Iraq, announced this month, which involves the deployment of 21,500 extra U.S. troops. "I believe the situation in Iraq can be turned around, but time is short," Fallon told the committee, meeting to consider his nomination. He sounded a note of caution when asked about the prospects of a democratic Iraq emerging from current levels of violence. "I think that we would probably be wise to temper our expectations," he said. More than 3,000 U.S. troops have died since the start of the war in March 2003. (Additional reporting by Andrew Gray in Washington, Ross Colvin and Mussab Al-Khairalla in Baghdad)
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