* Last fleet of 110 vehicles carrying 500 troops crosses border
IRAQ-KUWAIT BORDER: The last US forces left Iraq and entered Kuwait on Sunday, nearly nine years after launching a divisive war to oust Saddam Hussein, and just as the oil-rich country grapples with renewed political deadlock.
The last of roughly 110 vehicles carrying 500-odd troops mostly belonging to the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, crossed the border at 7:38am, leaving just a couple of hundred soldiers at the US embassy, in a country where there were once nearly 170,000 troops on 505 bases.
It ends a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers dead, many more wounded, and 1.75 million Iraqis displaced, after the US-led invasion unleashed brutal sectarian killing.
“It feels good, it feels real good” to be out of Iraq, Sergeant Duane Austin told reporters after getting out of his vehicle in Kuwait.
“It’s been a pretty long year – it’s time to go home now.”
The 27-year-old father-of-two, who completed his third tour in Iraq, added: “It’s been a long time, coming and going. It’s been pretty hard on all of us. It will be a nice break to get back, knowing that it’s over with now.”
The last group of vehicles transporting US troops out of Iraq left the recently handed over Imam Ali Base outside the southern city of Nasiriyah at 2:30 am to make the 350-kilometrejourney south to the Kuwaiti border.
They travelled down a mostly-deserted route, which US forces paid Shia tribal sheikhs to regularly inspect to ensure no attacks could take place.
Five hours later, they crossed a berm at the Kuwaiti border lit with floodlights and ringed with barbed wire.
“I am proud – all Iraqis should be proud, like all those whose country has been freed,” 26-year-old baker Safa, who did not want to give his real name, told reporters in Baghdad. “The Americans toppled Saddam, but our lives since then have gone backward.”
A 50-year-old mother-of-four who gave her name only as Umm Muhammad, or mother of Muhammad, added: “I don’t think we can ever forgive the Americans for what they did to us.”
The withdrawal comes as Iraq struggles with renewed political deadlock as its main Sunni-backed bloc said it was boycotting parliament and Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki, a Shia, moved to oust one of his deputies, a Sunni Arab.
Maliki sent an official letter to parliament calling on MPs to withdraw confidence in Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlak, a member of the secular Iraqiya party, after Mutlak accused the premier of being “worse than Saddam”, an aide to the prime minister said.
A day earlier, Iraqiya, which emerged as the largest bloc in inconclusive 2010 polls but was unable to form a government, said it was boycotting parliament to protest what it said was Maliki’s centralisation of power.
The bloc, which controls 82 of the 325 seats in parliament and nine ministerial posts, has not, however, pulled out of Iraq’s national unity government.
Iraqiya said the government’s actions, which it claimed included stationing tanks and armoured vehicles outside the houses of its leaders in the heavily-fortified Green Zone, “drives people to want to rid themselves of the strong arm of central power as far as the constitution allows them to”.
Provincial authorities in three Sunni-majority provinces north and west of Baghdad have all moved take up the option of similar autonomy to that enjoyed by Kurds in north Iraq, drawing an angry response from Maliki.
Key political issues such as reform of the mostly state-run economy and a law to regulate and organise the lucrative energy sector also remain unresolved, to say nothing of an explosive territorial dispute between Arabs and Kurds centred around the northern oil hub of Kirkuk. (AFP)
