Barack Obama will ask his military commanders to come out with a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq, a day after being sworn in as President of the US, a top aide to the President-elect has said.

“Yes,” David Axelrod, Senior Advisor to Obama, told the ABC news channel in an interview if the President-elect would give that command when he meets his military commanders on January 21, a day after becoming the US President.

“Well, that was something that he’s consistently said,” Axelrod said, when referred to the President-elect’s promise of withdrawing troops from Iraq in 16 months of coming to power.

“Obama believes that that is a reasonable timetable. We’ve moved a great distance from the time he started talking about that, and now we’re in an area where everyone agrees that we should be on a path to withdrawing those troops,” he said. “And he is going to begin that process, as promised, on that day,” Axelrod said.