August 31 has not meant the end of fighting for some of the 50,000 U.S. military personnel remaining in Iraq 7-1/2 years after the invasion that removed Saddam Hussein.
"Our rules of engagement have not changed. Iraq does remain from time to time a dangerous place, so when our soldiers are attacked they will return fire," said Brigadier General Jeffrey Buchanan, a U.S. military spokesman.
The American role in Iraq's battle to quell a tenacious Islamist insurgency has been waning since security in cities and towns was handed over to Iraqi police and soldiers in June 2009
"The TMA module has landed," an announcer at Mission Control outside Moscow said to applause from officials and relatives, relieved after an initial attempt to return from the orbital outpost was foiled by an equipment problem on Friday.
Space officials said the capsule landed upright, on time and on target near Arkalyk on the central Kazakh steppe. Swooping down beneath parachutes, it kicked up a cloud of dust as it hit after firing rockets to cushion the landing.
NASA TV showed technicians crouching over the hatch of the gumdrop-shaped capsule, its nose scorched by the heat of re-entry, and helping Soyuz commander Alexander Skvortsov out in his spacesuit.
"I feel fantastic. The landing was soft and smooth," he said.
NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson was next out, smiling as she was carried to an armchair at the landing site and covered with a blue blanket.
As cosmonaut Mikhail Korniyenko was extracted from the hatch in the top of the cramped capsule, Dyson chatted on a satellite phone.
Officially, U.S. forces remain in Iraq to "advise, train and assist."
When they answered a call for help two weeks ago from Iraqi soldiers overwhelmed in a gunfight with militants hiding in a palm grove near Baquba in Diyala province, U.S. troops brought in attack helicopters and F-16 jet fighters.
The F-16s dropped two bombs to help end the skirmish. They were the first bombs used in Iraq by the United States since July 2009, Buchanan said.
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