Two Army brigades leaving Iraq in the next six months due to drawdown won’t be replaced.

Iraqi leaders are welcoming U.S. plans to pull American combat troops out of Iraq by the end of August 2010. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says his country's security forces have proven they are ready to take over.

According to CNN President Barack Obama called former President George Bush as a "courtesy" letting him know about his plans to withdrow from Iraq by 2010 August.

According to a report published in NY Times the U.S. administration is nearing the decision to prepare the combat troop withdrawal from Iraq and to end the war.

The U.S. Defense Department says top military officials have briefed President-elect Barack Obama's national security team on plans to withdraw thousands of troops from Iraq next year. Mr. Obama has said he wants U.S. forces to leave Iraq within 16 months. Military officials did not say whether the Pentagon's plans match Mr. Obama's.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki say British forces will have "completed their tasks" in Iraq during the first half of 2009 and will leave at that time.

Australian troops will leave Iraq by the middle of next year after the Iraqi government set a deadline for the exit of all foreign forces from the battle-scarred nation.

Iraqi and U.S. officials have signed a pact to end the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Iraq U.S.A. withdrawal pact was signed today.

The White House says President George Bush has decided to withdraw about 8.000 U.S. troops from Iraq by next February and that he will announce the plan in a speech Tuesday in Washington.

President Saakashvili said Georgia was pulling out its troops from Iraq amid, what he called, an open military aggression by Russia in South Ossetia.

Presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has sought to distance himself from his campaign statements on troop withdrawal from Iraq, apparently under pressure from Republican rival John McCain's repeated questioning of his stand.

The US military announced on Thursday that the withdrawal of another 4,000 troops from Iraq next month as violence across the country hit a four-year low.