Iraqi - Withrawal by may 2007

THOUSANDS of British troops in Iraq are to return home in May, the News of the World can exclusively reveal. PM Tony Blair is to announce he is cutting our contingent in the war-torn country by almost HALF.

At the moment there are just over 7,000 Brit troops based in Southern Iraq. That number will be cut to 4,000.

A withdrawal had not been expected until November, but in a statement to Parliament in the next three weeks Mr Blair will say:

AT least four battalions which had been due to go to Iraq in May — replacing troops returning home — will stay here.

BRITAIN will hand control of Basra province to the Iraqi army and police within months.

THE remainder of British forces in Iraq will withdraw to their permanent base at Basra International Airport.

Rest of Article: www.newsoftheworld.co.uk...

Sounds good to me, think it will go through?


[edit on 18/2/07 by C ROBERTSON]

Yeah, it probably will. This is something Blair will want to do before he resigns sometime in the summer... if this is happening in May then I imagine he'll resign in either June (probably late in the month) or July, just before the summer parliamentary recess.

Hopefully the Iraqi forces will be up for the job and be ready for taking on primary responsibility for security in and around Basra.

I certainly hope so.. but how long until they will be sent elsewhere?

Yall will know what he will do anyways, once they are withdrawn from Iraq, they will be redeployed to afganistan, so Dont expect them home anytime soon......

Yall think Iraq will be sorted out by 2007? I dont think it will be....

"Yall think Iraq will be sorted out by 2007"

I don't think many people think Iraq will ever be "sorted" let alone by 2007. The best thing any of our forces can do now is get the hell out of there. Possibly carrying a big apology banner reading "ok public, we admit it, you were right, we were wrong, this was stupid"

Yeah, while obviously a political sunt to bring back voters, the PM said to the BBC that it was wild speculation that numbers would be halved - but you never know what their planning. But in anycase we'll have a presence there for the next 10 years as a peacekeeping force at least, like we see in bosnia and such. So who knows...

The troop numbers may fall (or may rise) who knows?
It's pretty obvious that the UK wants to 'draw down' as many troops as we can (if only for domestic political reasons) no matter which party is in power or who is at 'the helm'.

If you want to take a conspiratorial approach to this it's also possible that Iraq in a mess is 'job done' (as far as the initial war planners in the US are concerned).

On-going gross instability in Iraq and the ME generally has kept Iraqi oil off of the international markets, jacked the price of oil through the roof and this has helped keep the US $ at a level a lot higher than might otherwise have been the case.

.....and a collapsing US $ is not in anybodies' interests (which, in addition to the geo-political alliance, is maybe why the UK agreed to go along with this venture?).