Pentagon extends Iraq duty for 9,400 soldiers

By Will Dunham
Fri Sep 23, 1:21 PM ET

The Pentagon said on Friday 9,400 U.S. soldiers have been ordered to stay in Iraq beyond their promised yearlong duty to avoid the disruption of a troop rotation during national elections slated for December.

The soldiers will be kept seven to 10 days beyond their previously scheduled departure, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. The Pentagon has promised Army personnel tours of duty of no longer than a year in Iraq, while Marine Corps troops serve seven-month stints.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the extensions on Thursday, Whitman said.

U.S. troops have complained in the past about having their tours of duty in Iraq extended beyond promised departure dates, and Army surveys have shown that this lack of predictability in tour lengths had inflicted emotional stress on many soldiers and harmed morale.

The upcoming extensions, however, are shorter than those experienced by troops whose tours were extended during the transfer of sovereignty in June 2004 and January's parliamentary elections.

The 9,400 soldiers all had been scheduled to leave in mid-January. Extending their tours will allow commanders to postpone the transition period with the units replacing them until after the elections take place in a bid to maintain cohesion in the U.S. force, the Pentagon said.

Weeks before leaving Iraq, soldiers in a departing unit concentrate their efforts on preparing an arriving unit for the task it will assume.

"It's really to maintain stability of the U.S. forces during the Iraqi national elections," Whitman said.

TROOP LEVELS INCREASING

The United States has 147,000 troops in Iraq, about 9,000 over the recent average of about 138,000, in part because of an ongoing troop rotation and because the Pentagon has increased the force level in anticipation of an upswing in insurgent violence ahead of two political milestones.

A national referendum is slated for October 15 on a new Iraqi constitution. If voters approve it, they then would be scheduled to elect a new government on December 15.

About 4,000 soldiers from the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, based at Fort Stewart, Georgia, had been slated to leave Iraq on January 10 and now will be kept through January 20, Whitman said. About 5,000 soldiers from the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division had been slated to leave on January 19 and will be kept through January 26, Whitman said..

Both brigades are operating in north-central Iraq.

Another 400 soldiers from the 18th Airborne Corps headquarters, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, will be held over from their scheduled departure date of January 23 until February 2, Whitman said.

Whitman described the upcoming extensions as "very modest," although he acknowledged it meant these soldiers will stay longer than the one year they were promised.

"It's very much the goal of the department to keep these deployments to 12 months," Whitman said.

He noted that the fact that a decision on this extension went all the way up through the chain of the command to Rumsfeld reflected the seriousness of the Pentagon's commitment to keep predictability in tour lengths.

Pentagon officials previously said the U.S. force could approach the level of 159,000 present during January's elections, but a senior commander recently said he did not expect such a large increase. Whitman said he did not know how big the U.S. force will be for the upcoming election period.

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