Read the transcript of the interview with General David Petraeus

General David Petraeus is not a man to wear emotions on his sleeve.

But after almost three and a half years of living, fighting and sometimes just surviving in Iraq the US commander admits that he has become emotionally attached to Baghdad, a place he accidentally now calls “home”.

The 55-year-old looks every inch the Commanding General, pouring over battlefield statistics that plot the latest drop in attacks following an ambitious, military surge, which he implemented over the past year.

General Petraeus: The Times interview

'What sustains you is the Iraqis who are incurring enormous risk to try to achieve the vision of a new nation in an ancient land'

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But Iraq has changed him. He has picked up some phrases in Arabic, knows his way around the capital’s toughest neighbourhoods and when long-awaited key pieces of legislation were finally passed by the Iraqi Parliament last week, he admits he was overcome.

"It almost brought tears to my eyes,” he told The Times in a wide-ranging interview at his modest office in Saddam Hussein’s old palace on the Tigris.

During his time at the helm in Iraq, some 30,000 extra American troops have surged into hotspot areas across Baghdad and the surrounding belts, helping to reduce violence by more than 60 percent. This in turn has enabled, nascent political progress to occur and has almost certainly earned General Petraeus a place in history as the man who changed the face of the war.

Now he hopes to build on his success by also being the commander who brings the soldiers home. By July more than 20,000 American troops, over one quarter of America’s combat strength, will be withdrawn. Next month Gen Petraeus said he would present President Bush with a new report on Iraq, which will recommend reducing US troop even further.

But as the married father of two approaches his 42nd month in Iraq, he has learned to be wary of making optimistic predictions. By every measure Iraq is in better shape than when he took over command, but al-Qaeda continues to fight, the Mahdi Army, the main Shia Muslim militia, is threatening to break its ceasefire and Iran’s intentions remain a serious threat.

The former paratroop commander will never forget the bleak days of early 2007, when sectarian violence was raging and US casualties spiked.

“There were days that were about the hardest that I have ever experienced,” he said. “There is a discussion of the loneliness of command and it is the most lonely when the going is the most difficult.”

On occasion, the four-star commander and Lieutenant-General Ray Odierno, his former deputy, who left Iraq last week, would look at each other and say: “When are we going to get to that point? When are we going to crest this?”

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