IRAQ - UK To Begin Withdrawal.

In sharp contrast to the US troop buildup in Baghdad, UK PM Blair on Feb. 21 announced that as many as 1,600 of the roughly 7,100 British troops in southern Iraq would begin withdrawing in coming months. British military analysts said the reduction could be designed in part to free forces for deployment in Afghanistan to face any upsurge in fighting with the Taliban.

Senior British commanders have complained that their forces are overstretched by their twin deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Ministry of Defence in London, Britain has about 5,600 soldiers with the NATO-led forces in Afghanistan, 4,300 in the south and 1,300 in Kabul. Since 2001, the British have lost 47 soldiers in Afghanistan. The most recent fatality was announced on Feb. 21 when the Defense Ministry said a Royal Marine had been killed by an anti-personnel mine in Helmand Province. The British death toll in Iraq is about 130.

About 460 Danish soldiers under British command in southern Iraq will also be withdrawn by August, the government in Copenhagen said, and Lithuania said it was considering pulling out a small contingent of 53 soldiers in the south.

The British withdrawal was more modest than government ministers had suggested in recent weeks and Blair offered no clear timetable, during which Iraqi forces will take over some of the responsibility for patrolling Basra. A British opposition politician, Menzies Campbell, said the pullout would leave Iraq far from being the "beacon of democracy" which Blair had once promised. The PM acknowledged that conditions were not what he had hoped, saying: "What all this means is not that Basra is how we want it to be, but it does mean that the next chapter in Basra's history can be written by Iraqis". The city, he said, "is still a difficult and dangerous place". But he drew a clear distinction between the perils facing British forces in southern Iraq and American troops farther north.