U.S. commanders plan Iraq drawdown next year: general

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military commanders plan to maintain the current level of about 160,000 troops in Iraq until next year and then start to draw down, a U.S. general said on Friday.

Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno said security in Iraq had improved in recent months as the result of the "surge" in U.S. forces ordered by President George W. Bush but the gains did not yet represent enduring trends.

Much would depend on Iraqis' ability to build on that progress, he said.

Odierno, the top U.S. commander for day-to-day operations in Iraq, said extra units deployed for the build-up would leave between next April and August to keep a promise that their tour would not last more than 15 months.

"The surge, we all know, will end sometime in 2008," Odierno told reporters at the Pentagon by videolink from Iraq.

He said commanders would be faced with a decision on whether to replace the units. "Right now our plan is not to backfill those units," he said.

A final decision has not been made and would fall to Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Odierno said.

But his remarks offered an insight into the thinking of U.S. commanders in Iraq before a much-anticipated progress report due next month to the U.S. Congress by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad.

The military's planning contrasts with the views of Democrats who control Congress. They have called on Bush to start pulling troops out of the unpopular war but have not managed to pass a measure that would force him to act.

ATTACKS DOWN

Odierno said the total number of attacks in Iraq were at their lowest level since August 2006, and attacks against civilians in particular were at a six-month low. He did not give figures reflecting the number of casualties in recent and past attacks.

Civilian murders in Baghdad were down more than 51 percent since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a crackdown in the capital earlier this year, he said.

Odierno said the Baghdad murders were at their lowest level since just before the February 2006 bombing of the al-Askari mosque, a Shi'ite shrine in the city of Samarra, which set off a huge wave of sectarian violence.

"Although our recent tactical successes are not yet enduring trends, we are heading in the right direction," he said.

He echoed statements by U.S. officials that military operations cannot alone heal Iraq's sectarian divisions and Iraq's government must approve measures to foster reconciliation between Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds.

"We understand that our recent tactical successes will only add up if Iraqis take advantage of them and ultimately the government of Iraq is a key to progress," Odierno said.

"We are setting the conditions in buying the government of Iraq time to improve their capacity in order to gradually and steadily empower the Iraqi government and not hand them too much, too quickly," he said.