20 March 2004	Saturday	28 Muharram 1425

SEOUL, March 19: South Korea on Friday cancelled plans to deploy thousands of troops to Kirkuk in northern Iraq after Washington said it wanted to base troops and launch combat missions there.

South Korea's parliament agreed last month to send more than 3,000 troops to Iraq for relief efforts in a non-combat sector under their own command.

Washington made no request for South Korean troops to take part in joint combat missions, but the proposal still violated ground rules agreed for the dispatch of South Korean troops, the defence ministry said.

The proposal "runs against the principles of the troop dispatch approved by the South Korean parliament," the ministry said in a statement. Lieutenant General Kim Jang-Su of South Korea, who returned from negotiations in Iraq earlier Friday, said there was no US request for South Korean troops to take part in combat operations.

"The US side knew well about South Korean troops' limited role in offence operations," Kim told a press conference. South Korea is now looking for a more secure location for its troops. A decision can be expected in "a couple of weeks," Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon said.

Seoul's defence ministry officials, who held talks with top US military officials in Iraq this week, said the troop dispatch could be put back to June. The deployment of South Korean troops, the third-largest contingent in the war-torn state after the United States and Britain, was scheduled to begin next month.

Faced with the widespread unpopularity of the Iraq war here, South Korea has insisted its troops, mostly non-combatants, focus on humanitarian efforts. Some 400 South Korean medics and engineers are already serving in Iraq.

The decision to review the South Korean deployment came after Washington asked Seoul to allow US combat troops to remain in the Kirkuk area under South Korean strategic command, a position South Korea was unable to accept.

Washington "raised the inevitability of offensive operations to maintain order in the Kirkuk area and proposed that a certain number of US troops continue to be stationed in that area...," the defence ministry statement said.

It added that deployment rules "stipulate that South Korean troops will maintain their own independent command and control system in a defined area which they control for the purpose of carrying out peace and reconstruction efforts."

Candidates for a new deployment location include Najaf in southern Iraq, where 1,300 Spanish troops are currently stationed, Yonhap quoted officials as saying.

Spain's prime-minister elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has said he could pull the troops from the country unless the UN takes control of peacekeeping operations.

The oil-rich city of Kirkuk is a hotbed of ethnic strife in northern Iraq and increasingly a rallying point for anti-US resistance. The sensitive US request for South Korean troops came in September, splitting public opinion and triggering demonstrations both for and against the dispatch. -AFP