The final draft of SOFA with the amend­ments is pub­lished by the Iran­ian Fars News. These are the changes from all pre­vi­ous versions:

The United States army troops should with­draw from all Iraqi ter­ri­tory no later before 31 Decem­ber 2011, and all U.S. com­bat forces to with­draw from the cities, vil­lages and towns in Iraq before 30 June 2009, to be sta­tioned in facil­i­ties which will be decided by a joint com­mit­tee to coor­di­nate mil­i­tary oper­a­tions jmocc.

The agree­ment will trans­fer the con­trol over Iraqi air­space to the Iraqi author­i­ties as soon as this Agree­ment is active. The agree­ment includes that the U.S. troops are not allowed to arrest any per­son only in a deci­sion made in accor­dance with the Iraqi law, except the mem­bers of the United States forces or the civil­ian ele­ments [con­trac­tors].

If the U.S. troops arrest peo­ple [Iraqis] as autho­rized in this agree­ment or by the Iraqi law, these peo­ple must be handed over to the Iraqi author­i­ties within 24 hours.

The U.S. forces will pro­vide infor­ma­tion on all detainees to the Iraqi gov­ern­ment; The U.S. forces will coor­di­nate with the Iraqi author­i­ties to hand over the detainees to issue war­rants to arrest the most wanted or to release them accord­ing to the Iraqi law.

The U.S. forces are not allowed to raid homes or other prop­er­ties, only under an Iraqi war­rant issued in this regard and in coor­di­na­tion with the com­pe­tent Iraqi author­i­ties, except in cases where there are ongo­ing com­bat operations.

At one point 27 — 3 it says very clear that the U.S. forces are not allowed to launch [aggres­sion] mil­i­tary oper­a­tions against the neigh­bor­ing coun­tries. As for the U.S. mil­i­tary post 19 — 5 says it will be super­vised by the Iraqi government.

Directly after the announce­ment of the approval of the secu­rity agree­ment, the Sadrists played down the deci­sion say­ing:

This [SOFA approval] means noth­ing because the par­lia­ment will reject it.

Iraqpa reported about the increase in secu­rity mea­sures in the South­ern provinces after Muq­tada AL-Sadr announced the for­ma­tion of the new “Brigade” to fight the Amer­i­can pres­ence. The news site talks about army troops on the ground escorted by Amer­i­can – British mil­i­tary planes.

It seems that the United Iraqi Alliance is wait­ing for Sistani’s approval first to take a defin­i­tive deci­sion as reported on Iraqalaan that a del­e­ga­tion from the United Iraqi Alliance received the green light from Sis­tani, who him­self assured that the par­lia­ment will take the final deci­sion [there is some truth in the Sadrists state­ment].

Other polit­i­cal blocs such as the “Accor­dance front” announced that this is uncon­sti­tu­tional because there is an arti­cle in the con­sti­tu­tion says: “vot­ing on pacts must be done accord­ing to a law agreed upon by the par­lia­ment members”.

This con­nec­tion between Sistani’s posi­tion and the UIA approval is also con­firmed by the Green Zone news­pa­per Al-Sabaah say­ing that the United Iraqi Alliance met yes­ter­day to dis­cuss the final posi­tion from SOFA. The news­pa­per said that the approval is based on three “pos­i­tive” points:

- The change of the name of the secu­rity agreement.

- A timetable for the final withdrawal.

- An arti­cle in the agree­ment says “Iraq will not to be used as base to launch attacks on neigh­bor­ing countries”.

It would be inter­est­ing to watch how the Iran­ian are going to take revenge from Al-Hakim in the near future.