BAGHDAD, Oct 29: The international Red Cross said on Wednesday it was cutting back its foreign staff in Iraq, two days after a truck bomb devastated its offices here, but that it was not abandoning the war-torn country.

Pierre Kraehenbuehl, operations director for the International Committee of the Red Cross, insisted at a press conference in Geneva that “the ICRC is not withdrawing from Iraq.

“We are reducing the number of our international staff and implementing additional measures for the security of our remaining staff,” he said at the ICRC headquarters.

“We have no choice but to adapt the way we work in Iraq.”

The ICRC has 30 to 40 foreigners and about 700 Iraqi staff in the country, and had already pared down the number of expatriates since a Sri Lankan colleague was shot dead near Baghdad in July.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell had appealed personally to the chief of the ICRC not to pull foreign staff out of Iraq after the bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad on Monday.

That was one of a series of almost simultaneous car bomb attacks around the Iraqi capital that killed 43 people, including two Iraqi ICRC staffers, and wounded more than 200.

But Kraehenbuehl was adamant that despite the “devastating blow”, the staunchly neutral agency was making an independent decision on the best course of action.

“Any comment or advice is useful, but we’ll definitely be making our own determinations as to the future,” he said.—AFP