The military wants soldiers crossing from Iraq into Kuwait to be returned home faster, as they struggle to break a bottleneck of troops and beat the year-end deadline to withdraw. President Barack Obama announced last month that virtually all troops would be pulled from Iraq by the year’s end, in agreement with a U.S.-Iraqi pact that set December 31, 2011 as the deadline. A negotiation to extend the deadline broke down when U.S. troops could not be guaranteed legal immunity.
150 troops will remain in Iraq to assist in arms sales, but the 11,000 currently in the country must be gone by then. A military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, “The order is to have these soldiers off the ground in Kuwait as soon as possible. They don’t want these soldiers sitting around here. They want them home.”
