Japan ordered the withdrawal of its ground troops from Iraq yesterday, declaring the humanitarian mission a success and ending a groundbreaking dispatch that tested the limits of its pacifist postwar Constitution.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said the 600 non-combat troops -- deployed in early 2004 -- had helped rebuild the infrastructure of the area where they were based. He also promised further aid to help Iraqi reconstruction.
"Today we have decided to withdraw Ground Self-Defense Forces from the Samawah region in Iraq," Koizumi said in a nationally televised news conference. "The humanitarian dispatch ... has achieved its mission."
The withdrawal was decided in consultation with the US and other allies, Koizumi said. Defense chief Fukushiro Nukaga told reporters earlier in the day that the pullout would take "several dozen days."
Koizumi has been a vocal supporter of US policy in Iraq, arguing that the dispatch -- unpopular in Japan -- was needed to aid reconstruction, secure oil supplies and bolster ties with Washington.
"Japan's policy to cooperate with the United States based on the importance of the Japan-US alliance has never changed and will not change," he said.
In other developments, the bodies of two US soldiers who went missing south of Baghdad were found yesterday, while the US military said it killed 15 insurgents, but Iraqi police and a rights activist claimed they were ordinary poultry farm workers.
The bodies of the two soldiers, Kristian Menchaca, 23, and Thomas Tucker, 25, were found in a brutally "tortured" condition, General Abdul Aziz Mohammed of the Iraqi defense ministry said.
"The two US soldiers were found in the Yusifiyah area near the power station and unfortunately their bodies show that they had been tortured and then killed viciously," the general told a news conference.
The soldiers went missing on Friday night after they came under attack at a traffic control point near Yusifiyah, along the Euphrates river. One soldier was also killed in the attack.
The Mujahidin Shura (consultative) Council, a coalition of insurgent groups led by al-Qaeda in Iraq, claimed on Monday it had abducted the two soldiers.
The US military had launched a massive hunt for Menchaca and Tucker with nearly 8,000 troops searching for them by land, water and air.
Meanwhile, the US military said in a statement that troops killed 15 "terrorists" during overnight raids in a farmland near Baqubah. It said US troops came under small arms fire from the rooftop of a house when they arrived at their target.
But Iraqi police, relatives of those killed and a human-rights organization in Baqubah have given a conflicting version of the incident.
They said the victims were all poultry farm workers who had been sleeping in the fields of Bushaheen Village, when US troops raided the area.
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