Sectarian violence in Baghdad and Iraq as a whole has worsened in recent weeks, and the US military promised on Friday to draft more troops to Baghdad, saying that unrest between Sunni and Shia Muslims was now a bigger problem than the anti-coalition insurgency.
G4S came under fire after failing to provide sufficient security guards for the London Olympics, forcing the government to draft in troops to meet the shortfall.
The practice expanded under President Lyndon Johnson and Gen. William Westmoreland who started drafting ground troops in 1965.
A battalion of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment was added to troops drafted in following the emergency Cobra meeting on Christmas Day.
Even now, plans are being drafted for sending troops, at least temporarily, to the nation's borders to bolster federal agencies there, as advocated by President Bush in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
The 3,500 troops drafted in last week are in addition to 13,500 military personnel already involved in Games security.
I think they were saving their energy because the main protest, the one the police had drafted in 5,000 troops for, was scheduled in Kreuzberg at 6 that night.
This comes as Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced 1,200 troops were on stand-by, in addition to 3,500 troops recently drafted in.
The orders were drafted to give the troops maximum warning about their possible duty and to ensure that the bulk of them had not already been called up since Sept. 11, 2001, senior Pentagon officials said.
They said the job was initially entrusted to the Pakistani frontier corps, made up of poorly trained, overstretched and easily bribed militiamen drawn from tribes that span the border, and that Pakistani troops were drafted into the border regions only in December, possibly too late.
