Soldiers’ return from Iraq postponed again

? Postponing their return to their families for the second time in two months, the Pentagon announced Monday that more than 10,000 soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division would not, as they had been told, be coming home by the end of September.

The announcement came as India said it would not send a promised division of troops that would have added 17,000 men to the forces on the ground, though the Pentagon insisted there was no connection between the extended deployment and New Delhi’s decision.

Two-thirds of the division will remain in Iraq “indefinitely,” said Richard Olson, a spokesman for the division at Fort Stewart, Ga., its headquarters.

The division, which spearheaded the attack on Baghdad, had anticipated receiving orders in early June to return to the United States, but instead was ordered to tamp down Iraqi resistance in Fallujah.

On July 7, commanders had told the soldiers of two of the high-profile division’s three combat brigades that they could expect to be withdrawn from the war zone beginning next month.

And last Thursday, Gen. Tommy Franks, who retired last week as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, went even further, telling the House Armed Services Committee that the soldiers would be “out of Iraq by September.”

But continuing attacks on U.S. forces by Iraqi insurgents and the reluctance of other countries to commit forces are pressuring the Pentagon to maintain, if not bolster, the American military presence in the troubled nation.

The effort to persuade other nations to supplement U.S. forces suffered a setback Monday with India’s announcement. Pakistan and Portugal — two other countries the Pentagon had been counting on to send substantial numbers of troops — have also balked.

U.S. officials had asked the New Delhi government for a full division — about 17,000 soldiers — which would have made India the third-largest contributor of troops, after the United States and the United Kingdom.

After mulling American requests for more than two months, officials in New Delhi said they had concluded they could not take the politically unpopular move without the cover that a United Nations mandate would provide.

Instead, Foreign Minister Yashwant Singha told reporters in New Delhi, the government would help rebuild the country’s schools, medical and communications infrastructure, beginning with a hospital.

“We would have hoped that they would have made a different decision,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. But India “remains an important strategic partner for the United States,” Boucher said. He insisted the move would not harm U.S.-Indian relations.

Pentagon officials have declined to provide details on how many troops individual countries are providing for Iraq, but Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday on ABC-TV’s “This Week” that 19 countries were now taking part, 19 had agreed to assist in the future and the United States was talking to 11.

He said the contributors represented “a very large international coalition.”

Still, most of the countries that are taking part are contributing small numbers of troops, ranging in many cases from only a few dozen to a few hundred.

As of late last week the 3rd Infantry Division had 15,900 soldiers in Iraq, part of a total U.S. force in the country of 148,000. Pentagon officials said last week that 142,000 military personnel who had been deployed to fight the war had returned to their home bases, although most of those serve in the Air Force and Navy, leaving the burden in Iraq to ground forces. The current ground force figure is down from its peak of 151,000.

As recently as May, the Bush administration had said that it hoped to shrink the American military presence in Iraq to two divisions, by about 30,000 to 40,000 troops, by autumn, with a third multinational division also present, Pentagon officials said.