I had to go to an English French paper for this story:
Iraq army to take over in 2007 as Italian troops head home
01/12/2006 13h02
Nuri al-Maliki
©AFP/Pool - Hadi MizbanBAGHDAD (AFP) - The last Italian troops in Iraq headed home as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said his forces could take over the battered nation's security by June 2007.
Despite the optimism, violence raged unabated across Iraq with at least 12 people killed Friday, emphasising the difficulties faced by the embattled premier.
Baghdad itself resounded with the sound of machine gun fire as Iraqi soldiers clashed with insurgents in the Fadhel neighbourhood, wounding nine people, including three soldiers.
Overhead, US attack helicopters circled the site of the clashes.
Iraqi state television described the clashes as an operation against "terrorist hideouts" in the central Baghdad neighbourhood.
In southern Iraq, the British military told AFP that the last Italian troops were set to leave Dhi Qar province, ending their three-year mission in the war-ravaged country as part of the US-led coalition forces.
Earlier this year the Italian military had handed over the province's to Iraqi forces.
The last of the Italians are leaving today to Kuwait and from there they will go to Italy," British military spokesman Major Charlie Burbridge said, adding the troops had ended military operations in the past six weeks.
"All of them will be gone by the afternoon," he said.
On Monday Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said the remaining 70 troops would return home in the first few days of December.
Italy's centre-left parties, backing Prodi's government which replaced the conservative administration of Silvio Berlusconi after April elections, made withdrawal from Iraq one of the centrepieces of their election campaign.
Berlusconi was one of Bush's key allies in Europe and sent about 3,000 troops to southern Iraq in June 2003.
The Italians were deployed in Iraq's south along with British, Australians and Romanian forces.
The troops were deployed in Nasiriyah, the provincial seat of Dhi Qar, a relatively peaceful region compared to Iraq's central and western regions where US forces are battling a raging insurgency and a brutal sectarian conflict.
Marwan IbrahimPrime Minister Maliki meanwhile told US television network ABC that his forces will be ready to take charge of security in the country in June 2007.
"I can say that Iraqi forces will be ready, fully ready to receive this command and to command its own forces, and I can tell you that by next June our forces will be ready," Maliki said.
Maliki's statement came a few hours after his meeting with US President George W. Bush in Amman where the two leaders discussed Iraq's ability to secure the country on its own.
Upon his return to Baghdad from Amman, Maliki said that Bush was "responsive" to his government, wishing "success to his government so that we could ultimately be ready to gradually do away with the foreign forces," he told reporters.
Bush had hailed Maliki as a strong leader.
"He's the right guy for Iraq. We're going to help him, and it is in our interest to help him, for the sake of peace. He is a strong leader and wants a free and democratic Iraq to succeed," Bush told a joint news conference in Amman.
Maliki said he had won an agreement from Bush that he will take control of Iraq's security forces more quickly than planned, to allow him to fight the insurgency in his own way.
Ahmad Al-RubayeCurrently most of the fledgling Iraqi army comes under the day-to-day control of a US-led coalition, which also has 150,000 American troops.
Meanwhile the Washington Post reported Friday that the independent Iraq Study Group developing US policy recommendations will call for a withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq by early 2008.
In continued unrest, six Iraqis were killed in a two bomb attacks in and around Baghdad, security officials said.
A bomb exploded in the centre of Baghdad on the east side of the Tigris river, killing three people and wounding 16, while another car bomb killed three people on the outskirts of the capital.
Elsewhere around the country six more were killed.
http://www.afp.com/english/news/stories/061201120210.7w66oyzp.html
