IRAQ: SANCHEZ OUT, MILITIAS IN?

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who’s lead­ing U.S. mil­i­tary forces on the ground in Iraq, is going to be replaced.
“Sanchez has been besieged lately by ques­tions about his over­sight of detainee oper­a­tions in Iraq, espe­cially his role in the scan­dal over the abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. sol­diers at the Abu Ghraib prison out­side Baghdad,” the Washington Post notes. “But admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials said the move to install a new four-​​star com­man­der has been under con­sid­er­a­tion for months, well before the mis­treat­ment of detainees became major news. “
The Army’s second-​​in-​​command, Gen. George Casey, is the main con­tender for Sanchez’ job. But who­ever the new American leader is, it’s clear that he won’t have con­trol over all the forces keep­ing order in Iraq. The New York Times reports that with “the sharp dete­ri­o­ra­tion of the secu­rity sit­u­a­tion in recent months, American offi­cials appear to have resigned them­selves to work­ing with [pri­vate and tribal] mili­tias in Falluja, Baghdad and else­where even as American sol­diers die fight­ing them in street bat­tles in Karbala and Najaf.“
THERE’S MORE: “An Army sum­mary of deaths and mis­treat­ment involv­ing pris­on­ers in American cus­tody in Iraq and Afghanistan shows a wide­spread pat­tern of abuse involv­ing more mil­i­tary units than pre­vi­ously known,” accord­ing to the Times.

May 25th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.