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The number of American and other foreign soldiers in Iraq would fall to below 100,000 by the end of this year and an overwhelming majority would be out of the country in two years, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing the chairman of a high-level group planning the transfer of security responsibilities from American to Iraqi troops.

The statements of Mowattak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser and chairman of a joint Iraq-American committee planning the transfer, gave the strongest indication yet that the Bush administration was preparing to carry out significant reductions in US forces over the current year, the report said.

The committee comprised Rubaie, George Casey, the top US command in Iraq, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, according to the report.

There are now about 160,000 foreign troops in Iraq, about 140,000 of them American, with the rest coming from Britain, Italy, Poland and a number of other countries.

The planning for a troop withdrawal coincided with a classifiedassessment being conducted by the Bush administration of what the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan should look like throughthe Bush presidency and beyond, envisioning a day when American forces and large-scale American aid are greatly diminished in the two countries, the report said.

The assessment by the Iraq and Afghanistan Joint Transition Planning Group was focused not on the timing of troop withdrawals but on the mechanics of making the switch from a large military presence to a more traditional relationship run by American embassies, and how to do that while maintaining Washington's political leverage but at far less cost, the report quoted several State and Defense Department officials as saying.

By contrast, the working group in Iraq was addressing the delicate question of timing, and Rubaie asserted strongly in an interview with the newspaper that major reductions were planned.

According to the condition-based agreement, Rubaie was quoted as saying, the multinational forces would be reduced to fewer than 100,000 by the end of the year, and by the end of 2007, the overwhelming majority of foreign forces in Iraq would have left the country.

(Xinhua News Agency February 1, 2006)