WASHINGTON (AFP) - US military planners have identified 20 to 30 towns and cities in Iraq that must be brought under control before nationwide elections can be held in January, The New York Times reported.
Citing unnamed senior officials, the newspaper said the Pentagon has also devised detailed ways of deciding which ones should be early priorities.
Recent military operations to quell the Iraqi insurgency in Tal Afar, Samarra and south of Baghdad are the first and most visible signs of the new, six-pronged strategy for Iraq, approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration, the report said.
But officials involved in creating the plan acknowledge that US forces face an extraordinarily difficult task and that success is far from guaranteed, according to the Times.
The new strategy was written this summer and laid down in a series of classified directives to the new US Embassy in Baghdad and to the US military headquarters there, the paper said.
The report pointed out that the instructions were an acknowledgment that the insurgency had seized the initiative in Sunni strongholds north and west of Baghdad and in the southern city of Najaf.
For each of the cities identified as guerrilla strongholds or vulnerable to falling into insurgent hands, a set of measurements was created to track whether the rebels' grip was being loosened by initiatives of the new Iraqi government, using such criteria as the numbers of Iraqi security personnel on patrol, voter registration, economic development and health care, the Times said.
And for each city, a timeline was established for military action to establish Iraqi local control if purely political steps by the central government proved insufficient, according to the paper.