IRAQ: Nuri al-Maliki, the new Iraqi prime minister, had a surprise for Tony Blair and his entourage in Baghdad yesterday.
At a joint press conference, Mr Maliki said British troops would hand over responsibility in two provinces to Iraqi security forces by next month and that he expected US, British and other foreign troops out of 16 of the country's 18 provinces by the end of the year, a much more ambitious schedule than the US and Britain have so far admitted to.
The announcement was news to Mr Blair and his team. Mr Maliki said there was an agreement with the British: but British officials said there was no agreement. And he said the withdrawals would be in June: officials say it will be July.
Mr Blair was more vague. He insisted that there was no timetable and that the handover to Iraqi forces would depend on the prevailing conditions.
The US has 133,000 servicemen and women in Iraq and the British 8,000. The combined Iraqi army and police have 263,000 at present and are predicted to have a strength of 320,00 by the end of the year.
British and US troop withdrawals are scheduled to begin this summer and by the end of the year there will have been significant reductions, even though there will still be a sizeable foreign presence for anything between four and 10 years.
Mr Maliki said that by the end of the year Iraqi forces could have taken control of all the provinces except Anbar, to the west of Baghdad, where the insurgency is strongest, and Baghdad itself.
The British forces have responsibility for four provinces: Muthanna, Maysan, Basra and Dhi Qar (where Italian troops are stationed). Muthanna, which is to the west of Basra and contains relatively small towns such as Samawa that sit beside the Euphrates, will be the first to be handed over. Next will be Maysan, to the north of Basra and where British forces have suffered heavy losses. But the violence has tended not to be from organised insurgency but from criminal gangs and renegade bands who were active even under Saddam Hussein.
As part of the agreement, the Iraqi army and police have to demonstrate that they are competent to deal with various problems. There is a long tick-list they have to satisfy, not only their ability to fight insurgents but to demonstrate that the police, as well as the army, is relatively free of sectarianism.
The remaining two provinces in British hands will prove more difficult to hand over, in part because Basra is becoming more unruly and in part because the police force there is riven with sectarianism.
The US withdrawal is more problematic, mainly because the Americans are facing a more sustained insurgency campaign. But the intensity of the fighting in Baghdad, Anbar and, until the middle of last year, Nineva overshadows the relative peace in other parts of the US sector. First up for withdrawal is expected to be Najaf, the holy Shia city.
The US had been planning for the Iraqi forces to take over by July half of what the Pentagon refers to as its "battlespace". But that was before the insurgents increased their attacks in the past few months, killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians.
Insurgent attacks on US forces in March and April were at their highest since last autumn.
In a report to the Pentagon, Gen Barry McCaffrey, a retired commander who teaches at West Point, has warned that the Iraqi army is still badly equipped, with only a few light vehicles and almost no mortars, heavy machine guns, decent communications equipment, artillery, air cargo transport, helicopter troop carriers or strike aircraft of its own.