30,000 More Us Troops for Iraq

President George Bush will this week announce that up to 30,000 extra troops will be thrown into the battle for Baghdad. They will be part of a crackdown against insurgents and the largely Shia death squads who have brought the country to the brink of civil war.

The final shape of Bush's new strategy for Iraq began to emerge yesterday in a series of leaks and statements in Washington and Baghdad ahead of his announcement, expected on Tuesday.

That strategy, it now seems certain, will focus on stabilising the capital through the deployment of five extra US brigades - between 10,000 and 30,000 soldiers - made available by extending tours of duty and accelerating the rotation of fresh troops into the country. An increase of 30,000 would bring the number of US troops in Iraq to 170,000.

Bush's apparent determination to press ahead with sending additional troops, rather than setting a timetable for withdrawal, represents a rejection of the Iraq Study Group. It also sets the stage for a major political battle between a House and Senate newly under Democratic control, put into power largely because of misgivings in the US electorate over Bush's conduct of the war.

In the strongest indication of Bush's preferred strategy, Iraq's Shia Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki pre-empted Bush's statement by announcing that Iraqi security forces, backed by Americans, were about to implement a major crackdown on illegal armed groups from all sectarian factions in Baghdad. Maliki's speech was a US condition for deploying extra troops, insisted on by Bush in a two-hour teleconference with Maliki on Thursday.

Iraqi forces will begin a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood assault on militants in the capital over the next few days, as a first step in the new White House strategy to contain Sunni insurgents and Shia death squads, advisers to Maliki said.

One of the neoconservative thinkers whose views are believed to have influenced Bush suggested that the military surge might last longer than expected. 'We need a long-lasting surge because we have to keep in mind that we face an enemy here that adapts to our strategy,' said Frederick Kagan, a military historian and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. 'If we do a short surge they will just wait us out. We need to surge for at least 18 months.'

He added: 'The administration understands that they have reached the crossroads in Iraq. They know that any short-term or half measures will be fatal.'

The fresh Bush strategy, to be carried out by General David Petraeus, the new US commanding officer of multinational forces in Iraq, is modelled on Operation Forward Together II, the attempt to retake no-go areas of Baghdad last summer and autumn.

That operation faltered largely through a shortage of US manpower on the ground and Maliki's unwillingness to agree to raids against the Mahdi army, the Shia militia loyal to firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose assembly members supported Maliki's government.

It saw US and Iraqi troops follow a tactic of 'take, hold and rebuild' - driving gunmen out of their strongholds - and following through after the fighting with military civil affairs teams who worked to bring small but noticeable differences to the areas where they were operating, including electricity generation schemes, rubbish collection and repairing water and sewage provision. When the frontline troops moved on to new areas, gunmen returned.

The emphasis of operations is also expected to shift from preparing Iraqi forces for a quick handover of responsibility to protecting the population.

According to Maliki, military commanders in each area of Baghdad would have full powers to implement the plan as they saw fit. 'We will depend on our armed forces to implement this plan and the multinational force will support our forces,' Maliki said. 'They will intervene whenever they are called on.

'There will be no refuge from this plan for anyone who is operating beyond the law, regardless of their sect or their political affiliation,' he said, adding that the plan would continue until its objectives were achieved.

'We will come down hard on anyone who does not carry out their orders and who does their job according to his political or sectarian background. We will pursue those people under the law and punish them most severely,' he said, in an address at a monument to the Unknown Soldier.