SYDNEY, Nov 30: Australian prime minister-elect Kevin Rudd said on Friday he would pull the country’s 550 combat troops out of Iraq by the middle of next year, marking a significant shift in Canberra’s role in the conflict.

Rudd was elected in a landslide on Saturday that ousted veteran conservative prime minister John Howard, a staunch supporter of the US-led war in Iraq and a friend of US President George Bush.

Former diplomat Rudd had promised to withdraw the battle group from Talil in southern Iraq if elected but said he would leave behind some Australian soldiers, including those providing security at Australia’s embassy in Baghdad.

“The combat force in Iraq, we would have home by around about the middle of next year,” Rudd told a Melbourne radio station.

“We’ve not begun our discussions with the United States on that. We’ll have a meeting with the United States ambassador before too long to set up the appropriate processes for discussing that.” Australia has some 1,500 troops involved in Iraqi operations, although most are outside the country. Only the 550 combat troops deployed in the south of the war-torn nation are subject to Rudd’s withdrawal plan.

Bush has warned that withdrawing from Iraq would encourage militants opposing his “war on terror.” Rudd, the leader of the centre-left Labour Party who will officially take office on Monday, has sought to allay fears the withdrawal will hurt Canberra’s strong links with its most important strategic ally in Washington.

In his victory speech on Saturday, Rudd extended an olive branch to Washington by sending his greetings to “our great friend and ally the United States” and said he would visit the White House next year.

The US ambassador in Australia, Robert McCallum, has said the US will be involved in working on the withdrawal plan with the new government.

“It’s a situation where Australia is determining how it is going to reposition forces and how it is going to deploy its resources in a new and different way, and we are looking forward to working with Mr Rudd in achieving that,” McCallum said earlier this week.

“There are going to be Australian troops left in Iraq as security forces that relate to the Australian embassy in Baghdad, there are naval forces and air forces that are offshore that relate to security issues.” Iraq was a key point of difference between Rudd’s centre-left Labour Party and Howard’s conservative coalition during the election but analyst Hugh White said the two parties’ policies on Iraq had converged weeks before the election, with Howard saying he would consider repositioning the battle group.

Professor White, who heads the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, said he did not expect Rudd’s government to replace the battle group.

“But we would expect them to maintain the same level of commitment in other areas,” he said, such as training Iraqi forces and their naval commitments in the region.

“To be brutally frank about it, the Australian forces in Iraq really do play a more symbolic than substantive role.” Australia was one of the founding members of the “coalition of the willing” that joined the US-led invasion of Iraq in early 2003 and has had a modest contingent, which has escaped serious casualties, in the country ever since.—AFP