The US military will transfer control of security in Iraq's Anbar province to Iraqi forces this week, a remarkable turnaround given the vast western region was considered lost to insurgents less than two years ago. Anbar will be the 10th of Iraq's 18 provinces returned to Iraqi security control since the US-led invasion in 2003, but it will be the first Sunni region handed back. Mamun Sami Rasheed, Anbar's governor, said the handover ceremony would take place on Saturday. The commander of US forces in western Iraq, Marine Major-General John Kelly, said the impending handover showed Iraqi forces were increasingly ready to defend Iraq against threats such as those posed by Al-Qaeda. “Anbar province is ... an important milestone. It changes the nature of our security relationship here,” he told Reuters. Anbar was once the heartland of the Sunni insurgency against US forces and successive Shiite-led administrations that took over in Baghdad following the downfall of Saddam Hussein, who was from Iraq's minority Sunni Arab community. US-led forces have so far transferred security control for three Kurdish provinces in the north and six Shiite provinces in the south. Meanwhile, Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki vowed Monday to extend military operations against all those who defy the “will of the nation,” but he also called on Iraqi troops to respect the rights of citizens amid complaints of bad behavior and arrests without warrants. He was speaking in the southern city of Amarah, the site of an ongoing military crackdown against Shiite militiamen – the fourth such drive by government forces.
