Reuters  --  Arab News

SEOUL, 13 June 2004 — South Korea plans to deploy troops to Iraq in three installments between late July and August, a South Korean newspaper said yesterday in a report that finally gave a date after months of delays amid some domestic opposition.

A Defense Ministry official told Reuters the timing of the troop dispatch was likely to be fixed next week.

The government has pledged to send 3,000 troops to northern Iraq in addition to 650 South Korean Army medics and engineers already serving in the country for a year.

But eight months after a pledge by President Roh Moo-hyun and four months after parliamentary approval, the government has yet to announce where they will be deployed and when. The government has said it will proceed despite small protests and opposition from some members of Parliament.

“(The government) is seeking to send 1,000 troops in a divisional headquarters and another 1,000 in a brigade between July and August,” the JoongAng Ilbo daily quoted a senior Defense Ministry official as saying.

The deployment of the remainder of the troops would be decided after observing the situation in Iraq, he said.

“We have not made an official announcement on the timeframe and other details, and expect the decision would be made around next week,” Shin Kyung-ja, a Defense Ministry spokeswoman, told Reuters.

A committee of security-related ministers was expected to hold another meeting next week to give a final nod to the plan, but Lee Jihyun, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, was unable to give a date for that gathering.

South Korea will have the third-largest military contingent in Iraq, after the United States and Britain, if the pledged forces are sent.

In Seoul, a crowd of some 2,000 including students and anti-war activists rallied near the US Embassy yesterday, commemorating the death of two South Korean girls killed by a US military vehicle two years ago. The gathering was also to protest the planned dispatch of South Korean troops to Iraq.

The protesters, who marched about two kilometers from a public park to the busy district of Kwanghwa Gate, occupied the busy Jongro Street and staged a sit-down on the pavement. They prayed for two teenaged girls who were struck and killed by a US military armored vehicle in June 2002.

The tragic incident sparked a wave of anti-US protests, including violent ones. The commander of the vehicle and its driver were later acquitted of negligent homicide in US military court, further inflaming protests.

The court found that a blind spot prevented the driver in the vehicle from seeing the girls walking along the roadside during a military training.