Draft is set to keep U.S. forces on Iraqi soil

Iraqi and American negotiators have agreed to a draft of a long-awaited security agreement to govern the presence of American troops in Iraq, . . .

The main sticking points, in fact, are also the most delicate: setting a timeline for American troops to leave and declaring whether American forces would be granted immunity from Iraqi prosecution.

In Baghdad, Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s foreign minister, said that the text of a draft had been agreed upon by negotiators on the technical and legal teams who had worked on it since March 11. But he cautioned that this fell short of a final agreement because it had yet to be approved by the political leadership in either country, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.