KIEV, Jan 10: Ukraine's outgoing president ordered officials on Monday to bring the country's 1,600 troops in Iraq back home in the first half of this year, after eight of its soldiers were killed in an explosion.
Leonid Kuchma told his defence and foreign ministers to draw up the plans in an emergency meeting following Sunday's blast, which also killed a soldier from Kazakhstan. "The withdrawal of one battalion from Az Zubair district could take place during March-April. The rest of the troops could be withdrawn in (the following) two or three months," Defence Minister Oleksander Kuzmuk said.
Mr Kuchma is due to turn over power this month to president-elect Viktor Yushchenko, who has long said he would bring the troops home. Mr Yushchenko said on Monday he would make the withdrawal a priority as soon as he took office.
"As is well known, the withdrawal of the Ukrainian peacekeeping force is one of our priorities. Yushchenko will address it immediately after he takes the post of president," his Web site said.
The initial official account of the incident - the worst ever suffered by Ukrainian forces in 10 years of international peacekeeping - said the troops had been killed accidentally while trying to detonate a cache of explosives.
But Ukraine's defence ministry said authorities were now investigating the possibility it was an attack. "It's a preliminary scenario, but this might have been a pre-planned action," a spokesman said.
Acting chief commander of ground forces Volodymyr Mozharovsky told reporters in Kiev that a suspicious car and parts of a bomb had been found at the site. A Web site ran a claim of responsibility for the blast by a group called the Islamic Army in Iraq, one of several fighting the interim Iraqi government and its US backers. The group has claimed responsibility for several past kidnappings and attacks.
Mr Yushchenko is expected to take power this week after a long-drawn-out struggle for the presidency with former prime minister Viktor Yanukovich, in which a run-off vote had to be staged for a second time after fraud allegations.
Both candidates pledged to bring the troops home, making their eventual withdrawal a foregone conclusion. But Kuchma had resisted a call from parliament to give the order to withdraw.
The Ukrainian contingent is one of the largest in a multinational division under Polish command, whose numbers have dwindled to 6,000 as Spain and some other countries pulled out forces during the last year. Poland itself says it will draw down its contingent, which now numbers 2,400. -Reuters
