Top US Brass Reject Fallujah Brigade Leadership
msnbc.msn.com
BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least nine U.S. service members were killed in Iraq on Sunday, the military said, signaling the possibility that U.S. casualties in Iraq may continue at the same grisly pace as in April, until now the bloodiest month since the conflict began 13 months ago.
News of the attacks comes after the top U.S. military commander said that reports that Gen. Jasim Mohamed Saleh, a former general in Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guard, would take charge in the volatile Iraqi city of Fallujah, have been “very, very inaccurate.”
U.S.: Ex-Saddam general to be replaced
Meanwhile, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday that Saleh, a former general in the Republican Guard, is unlikely to take charge in Fallujah and is still being vetted to lead a possible Iraqi peacekeeping force.
“There’s another general they’re looking at,” Gen. Richard B. Myers told ABC’s This Week. “My guess is, it will not be General Saleh. ... He will not be their leader ... He may have a role to play, but that vetting has yet to take place,” said Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Myers’ appearance on three different Sunday morning political talk shows seemed calculated to counter reporting out of Iraq suggesting the U.S. military had suffered a virtual defeat in Fallujah and had turned to Saddam’s former military chiefs to salvage the situation.
“No, it’s not a reversal,” Myers said on ABC of his remarks that failed to confirm Saleh as military chief in Fallujah. “I think the — again, as I said, the reporting on this has been very, very bad and way ahead of the facts.”
Myers, who said Marines have not withdrawn from Fallujah, did not respond to a question on Fox News Sunday on whether Saleh, a former general who once served in Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, had been involved with the brutal suppression of Iraq’s Kurdish minority, but he reiterated that Saleh was not in command of the forces inside Fallujah.
“The reporting to date has been ... very, very inaccurate,” Myers told Fox News. “We’ve gotten a lot of help from tribal sheiks and other folks.”
Meanwhile, Saleh set up the possibility of fresh confrontations with U.S. forces when he denied the presence of foreign fighters in Fallujah.
“There are no foreign fighters in Fallujah, and the local tribal leaders have told me the same,” Saleh told Reuters in an interview.
U.S. Marines turned to Saleh when he offered to help restore order to Fallujah, after a month-long siege. But his U.S. backers say foreign Islamic guerrillas are stoking the insurgency by up to 2,000 fighters in the city, combatants once among the most loyal to Saddam.
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