WASHINGTON, Oct 19: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused on Wednesday to speculate on whether US troops would be out of Iraq in five or even 10 years.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rice acknowledged that Iraqi guerillas may be capable of carrying out attacks ‘for quite a long time’.

But she parried questions from Demcoratic lawmaker Paul Sarbanes on the timing of a pullout of US forces that invaded Iraq 31 months ago to oust dictator Saddam Hussein.

Asked if the 140,000 American troops would be out in five years, Rice said, “I don’t want to speculate. I do know that we’re making progress with what the Iraqis themselves are capable of doing.

“And as they are able to do certain tasks, as they are able to hold their own territory, they will not need us to do that,” the chief US diplomat said.

Sarbanes pressed on, saying, “Let me rephrase the question a little easier: what about 10 years from now?” But again, Rice would not bite.

“Even to try and speculate on how many years from now there will be a certain number of American forces is not appropriate,” she said. “What is appropriate to say is the Iraqis have made progress.”

But she added later that it was vital to avoid a situation ‘in which we withdraw prematurely and leave Iraqi forces incapable of dealing with the insurgency’.

Rice insisted that ‘we are moving on a course in which Iraqi security forces are rather rapidly able to take care of their own security concerns’.

She said that 91 Iraqi regular army battalions were currently in combat, compared with five in August 2004.—AFP