Report: 90,000 U.S., Iraqi combined force readying for Baghdad 'crackdown'

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. Army engineers have torn down houses and surrounded the newly cleared space with razor wire atop concrete blast walls for neighborhood bases, the first outward signs of the coming Baghdad security crackdown.

American and Iraqi commanders are pulling together a force that numbers -- on paper at least -- about 90,000 troops for what many see as a last-chance drive to curb the debilitating violence that has turned Baghdad into a battleground and killed -- according to the United Nations -- more than 34,000 civilians last year alone.

"This will be a difficult mission and time is not on our side," Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who will soon take over the U.S. command in Iraq, said in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.

In the past eight months, two U.S.-Iraqi security missions have failed to rout gunmen, bombers, suicide attackers and the death squads that haunt Baghdad's streets after dark. The U.S. military blamed Iraq's Shiite-dominated government for its inability to muster sufficient troops.

Of the 90,000-troop force now assembling for a new try at calming the capital, more than half were to be Iraqi soldiers and police, a large majority of whom are Shiite Muslims.

Read the rest at the Washington Post

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