The United States is considering cutting the staff at its embassy in Baghdad by as much as half, just two months after withdrawing its last troops from Iraq, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
The newspaper said unnamed officials in Baghdad and Washington said they were reconsidering the 6-billion-dollar annual price tag and nearly 16,000 staffers, dpa reported.
Most of the staff are not diplomatic personnel but security contractors. The US had hoped to bolster its diplomatic efforts following the withdrawal of its military forces, but interaction of the 2,000 diplomats with ordinary Iraqis has been limited due to security concerns.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters that the department was not considering cutting the number of diplomats by half, but said officials were "looking at how we can right-size our embassy in Iraq and particularly how we can do more for that mission through the hiring of local employees, rather than having to be as dependent as we've been in the past on very expensive contractors."
The process of evaluating how many contractors were needed had only just begun, and no number had yet been determined, she said.
"We are trying to ensure that (the evaluation) is rigorous and that it gets us to a much more normal embassy, like some of our big embassies around the world," she said.
The largest US embassy in the world was built at a cost of 750 million dollars and dedicated in 2009.
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