US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is paying a one-day visit to Iraq, his eighth in all to the country
In an address to US troops upon landing at the Mosul airfield, he said they had shown “that America is in fact a land of liberators, not a land of occupiers”.
But he underlined the importance of local security forces in taking control of the situation: “It is the Iraqis who have to over time defeat the insurgency.”
Hours earlier, 10 Iraqi police were killed during a fierce gun battle late on Thursday in Salman Pak, south-east of Baghdad
