American Troops To Pull Out of Iraq By the End of the Year

US Trooper Salutes Iraqi Security Forces

The president of the United States Barack Obama on Friday announced that all the American troops would leave Iraqi territory by the end of the year, thus concluding a war that had been going on for eight years, with an estimated loss of 4,478 American soldiers and cost more than $1 trillion. The president announced that only a Marine embassy guard and liaison officers would remain in the place of more than a million troops that served in Iraq.

Obama fulfils a campaign promise to end the war in Iraq, and the announcement that comes one day after the NATO campaign that put an end to Qaddafi’s rule in Libya, is symbolic and marks the end of a decennial engagement of the American troops in what they called the war against terrorism.

Obama said that all American troops would be home for the holidays, and highlighted that this was a campaign promise he was keeping.

The withdrawal is the result of a irreconcilable position between the United States and Iraq over the immunity of a small force of military trainers the Pentagon had planned to leave behind.

He promised however the Iraqi officials that the American officer would still be able to advise the Iraqi security forces but that the chances of them remaining on Iraqi soil are slim.

Obama’s political adversaries have intensely criticized the move, while the military has tried hard to avert the situation.

During the videoconference, the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki expressed gratitude for the American sacrifice during the war, and Barack Obama stressed out that as of January 1, 2012 the two states would have a normal relation between two sovereign states with mutual interests and respect.

The US military wanted a “residual” force to stay past 2011 so that the situation in Iraq may not degenerate. They were caught by surprise by this decision, which was made as a result of the collapse of negotiations on immunity granted to the soldiers operating in the field.

There are some 40,000 troops still in Iraq, and they will leave Iraq until the end of this year. They are the last ones to leave Iraq, after all the combatant troops have been pulled out in August 2010, when Obama declared that the war was over.

US Troops Fallen In Iraq

The White House assured the Iraqis that the Iraqi security forces were ready to take the lead in security matters.

The decision to pull out is not only a promised kept by the president of the United States but also a victory for the Iraqi PM, who can say that he is the one to end American military presence in his country and to restore the sovereignty of Iraq.

Weird as it sounds, some Iraqi officials, and even average people, accused the United States in August 2010 that they turned tail and ran out of Iraq, leaving it in ashes, at the mercy of warlords and sectarian violence.

Situation seems to have improved somehow over the past year but the danger of it sinking into chaos is still a possibility.

Soon after the decision to pull out in August 2010, there was a chain of violent attacks of the insurgents on both the American troops and the Iraqi security forces. For months, security forces have been targeted in an attempt to destroy their morale.

In the United States, there are critics that say that the US army is leaving behind military installations that have cost the American taxpayers billions to build.

When George Bush pushed for this war, there was an assumption that the United States would be present in Iraq for a very long time. So military bases were built and auxiliary facilities and services. They will all be left behind by the US army as a relic of their passage through this country.

Over the past few years the country had multiple elections rounds, and some 15 million Iraqis have expressed their vote for one party or another. Still, the country remains atomized and prisoner to all sectarian fights within.

Not only the Muslim persecute Christians, as it happened at the end of last year, when a wave of violence against Christians raised and was close to driving them away from the country they had been born in.

Iraqi society is divided between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims, and both groups have political representation. The Shiites are represented by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, National Reform Trend, Islamic Virtue party, and the Sadrist Current, while the Sunnis are represented by Iraqi Islamic Party, and the Awakening Councils.

As one can see, there are more Shiite parties than Sunni, reflecting the influence of Iran over the political landscape of the country. One of the Shiite leaders, Moqtada al-Sadr returned from Iran after a period in which he avoided prosecution for a crime he had committed.

There are nationalist parties, like Prime Minister Maliki’s Islamic Call Party, which, though is of Shiite inspiration, is considered a secular party, which a leader that is about one of the few nationalists in an atomized country.

Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan are also nationalist parties, as the Kurds in the northern part of the country have established their own autonomous republic.

US Troops Pull Out of Iraq

The Iraqi Kurdistan is having a very serious economic tie with Turkey, which is currently conducting an expedition against the Turkish Kurds hiding in that region.

Iraqi surveys show that since March 2003 102,417 to 111,938 Iraqi people died in the conflict, while the number of civilians combined with that of combatant Iraqis climbs to 150,726.

WikiLeaks cited classified Iraq war logs as saying that 104,924 people died and that the civilian death toll is of 92,003 (or 66,081).

As the war started on the assumption that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he had been in connection with the terrorist groups, the president Bush was in the situation of not being able to explain where these weapons were and what connections did Saddam had with the terrorists.

Another thing the Americans leave behind is the terrifying memory of the Abu Ghraib prison, and the abuses against civilians that happened in there.

For all these reasons, Amnesty International requested the countries George W. Bush was visiting to arrest him for crimes against humanity and war crimes. The same set of problems has former British PM Tony Blair, who was asked to appear before an inquiry panel on British involvement in Iraq and was placed symbolically under citizen’s arrest by human rights activists.