Officials said the center would serve as headquarters for the U.S.
Army's 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment as well as the 11th Iraqi Army.
They said construction of the facility was completed on June 19.
"In order to be more hands-on, we must share everything including
workspace," Wallace said.
The joint facility was established as part of the Status of Forces
Agreement, which went into effect in January 2009. Under the accord, the
U.S. military would withdraw from all Iraqi cities by June 30 in the first
step of a full combat troop withdrawal by 2012.
The U.S. military has handed over more than 140 facilities to the Iraqi
government. They included combat outposts and joint security stations
throughout Baghdad.
As a result, the U.S. Army has been relocating bases outside the Iraqi
capital. JOC, located in an abandoned warehouse hangar, would comprise 4,300
square feet, or more than 2,500 square meters.
The facility would contain 10 secured offices and a tiered conference
room
with computer workstations and a combined working area for battle tracking.
Currently, the staff has been confined to two small offices.
"Every day the Iraqi general comes over asking if we need any help,"
U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Gary Butler, the officer in charge of construction,
said. "He even let us borrow his pressurewasher and a few of his soldiers to
help clear the surface of debris anddirt before we began construction."
On June 20, the U.S. Army transferred a Joint Security Station in
Baghdad's Sadr City, long a bastion of Iranian-sponsored Shi'ite insurgents.
The station was the third U.S. base in Sadr City transferred to Iraqi
control this month.
"Today this base returns to its true owner," U.S. Maj. Gen. Daniel
Bolger, the commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division, said. "The
activities of the enemy were much higher in the past years and as the enemy
activity has dropped and the Iraqi army has gone stronger, and the Iraqi
people have grown more secure, it's a good time for the United States to
step back and to take more of a supporting role."
