WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday acknowledged that the United States has made mistakes in building Iraqi security forces.

　　Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee, Rice said "To be fair, we made a mistake earlier. We relied on number rather than on quality."

　　However, the top U.S. diplomat noted that "large portions" of the Iraqi infrastructure had been modernised and some 227,000 "quality" Iraqi troops had been trained and equipped to battle against insurgency alongside US forces.

　　The United States has been trying to speed up training of Iraq's government troops and security forces in a bid to pave way for the eventual military withdrawal from the gulf country.

　　Military sources revealed that of the 227,000 trained and equipped Iraqis, less than 100,000 have been organized into battalions as fighting forces.

　　For now, there are some 160,000 foreign troops in Iraq, about 150,000 of them American, with the rest coming from Britain, Italy, Poland and a number of other countries.