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Corps to hand over control of Anbar

After a summer of delays, the highly touted handover of security in the once-volatile Anbar province of Iraq is scheduled for next week, the top Marine in Iraq said Tuesday.

Iraqi officials signed a memorandum of understanding Tuesday that paved the way for the handover of security next week, Maj. Gen. John F. Kelly said from Iraq in a telephone interview with Marine Corps Times.

The announcement comes on the heels of Commandant Gen. James Conway’s trip to the region in which the top Marine officer touched down first in Afghanistan, where several thousand Marines are fighting the Taliban and training Afghan security forces, then visited Iraq — a sign of the evolving level of importance between the two theaters.

Conway is slated to hold a press conference Wednesday morning to discuss the details of his trip through the Middle East.

The security handover was originally scheduled for late June, but was postponed twice due to weather and then indefinitely due to a governing conflict between the local and national governments that was recently resolved, said Kelly, the commander of Multi-National Force — West.

The increasing success of the 28,000-strong Iraqi police force in Anbar in securing the province has freed Marines to hunt down the remaining elements of Al Qaeda in Iraq, making next week’s event largely symbolic.

But it symbolizes the monumental gains Marines have achieved in securing an area once home to a bloody Sunni insurgency and considered lawless only two years ago.

“We are certainly not the last or the first province to [hand over control], but we are the most remarkable province to [do it] because of how intense the fighting was here,” Kelly said.

The handover of power — widely referred to as Provisional Iraqi Control, or PIC for short — is not, however, a sign that Marines will be departing Anbar in large numbers any time soon, Kelly said.

“PIC doesn’t mean that forces come home,” he said. “It just changes the relationship between the forces.”

But Kelly said he expects an announcement next month by Gen. David Petraeus for additional troop withdrawals will impact the number of Marines in Anbar.

“I’ve got to think it will affect a lot,” Kelly said of the pending announcement.

The number of troops in Anbar has drooped from 37,000 at the beginning of the year to about 25,000 on Tuesday, Kelly said.