Iraqi troops will be ready to take over from foreign forces as early as November 2007, new Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said ahead of a summit between the US and British leaders aimed at charting a new course for the war-ravaged country.
"Our forces will be able to take over the security file in all Iraqi provinces in a year and a half," Maliki pledged Wednesday.
But his comment came a day after Washington downplayed any imminent cutbacks in US forces amid surging violence in Iraq, where Maliki's government was sworn in on Saturday after months of political bickering.
On Thursday alone, there were reports of three kidnappings, the discovery of the bodies of six people believed to have been killed in sectarian revenge murders as well as two deaths in a drive-by shooting.
Among those kidnapped was a judge from the town where ousted president Saddam Hussein is accused of having massacred nearly 150 Shiite villagers in the 1980s.
And an influential global security think-tank further dampened hopes that foreign troops would soon go home, saying Iraqi security forces were unlikely to be effective in curbing the rise in sectarian violence.
"The speed with which the new Iraqi army and more particularly the police force have been built does raise problems," a report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said in London.
"The rank and file of both forces are neither well enough trained to be fully effective on their own, nor sufficiently loyal to the national government to remain above the sectarian struggles gouging Iraq's sense of national identity," the IISS said.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Tony Blair -- who met Maliki earlier this week in Baghdad -- flies to Washington on Thursday for talks with President George W. Bush on the future of Iraq.
Officials on both sides of the Atlantic said the two leaders will not be setting a timetable for a troop withdrawal, but it is clear they are banking on the new government in Baghdad to help extricate themselves from an increasingly unpopular war that has left them weakened at home.
Both men, who have seen their popularity ratings drop, need to show their constituencies that there is some movement forward in Iraq, observers say.
With some 8,000 troops, Britain has the second-largest foreign contingent in Iraq after the United States, which has about 130,000 soldiers on the ground.
Washington has lost 2,460 soldiers in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to topple Saddam and Britain has lost 111.
Maliki has yet to find heads for the interior and defense ministries because of differences between the rival ethnic groupings, but he promised to fill the posts by the weekend.
But the IISS said more foreign troops would be needed before violence is curbed, not less.
"The danger is clear: an increase in instability, violence and radical Islamism," it warned, adding that there were some 20,000 fighting in insurgent ranks.
"The alternative would be a larger role for overt, coordinated, multilateral intervention, involving the key regional powers, to stabilize the situation."
US officials on Tuesday also sought to caution against turning security responsibility over to Iraqis too hastily.
"We want to do it as soon as we can, but you can't do it too fast. We've talked about rushing to failure. We've got to be very careful to not do that," Brigadier General Carter Ham told reporters in Washington.
The dangers of a general atmosphere of insecurity are brought home to Iraqis on a daily bases with regular reports of killings, kidnappings and torture surfacing in the press and on the streets.
Dujail judge Walid Ahmed was traveling on a highway between Saddam's hometown of Tikrit and the city of Samarra when he was abducted from his car on Wednesday, an interior ministry source said.
Saddam and seven co-defendants are currently facing charges of crimes against humanity and could face the death penalty if found guilty of ordering the Dujail killings.
The Iraqi tribunal is currently hearing defense witnesses in the case but there was no indication that the kidnapping was connected to trial proceedings.
Two Iranian truck drivers shipping propane were also kidnapped in a separate incident northeast of Baghdad.
