Oral question asked in the House of Commons, by Tobias Ellwood (Conservative). It was answered on Monday, 14 November 2005 on behalf of the Ministry of Defence.

Iraq

Question: If the British area of responsibility is deemed safe and ready for handover before that of the Americans, can the Secretary of State confirm that British troops will return before the Americans do?

Answer: The process of handover will be determined by conditions on the ground and if they are different in one area from another area, the handover will take place at a different pace. That is completely consistent with what we have said before. We have moved from a position in which we had very few trained and capable Iraqi troops to having more than 211,000 Iraqi security force members who are trained and capable. About half of them are army and they have started to participate in operations, but they are not yet capable of autonomously leading operations. In other words, they are reliant on the multinational forces, including ourselves, for first aid back-up, logistics, leadership, intelligence and other things. We believe that, in the course of next year, they will be able to begin to deal autonomously with such issues. As they do so, we will first withdraw to barracks and then we will withdraw from Iraq itself. That may happen at different rates in different parts of the country and will correspond to circumstances on the ground.

Secondary information