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| Sunday, 26 June 2005 |
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US wants Japan in Iraq TOKYO, June 25 (AFP) The United States has asked Japan to extend its humanitarian mission in Iraq after December when the current deployment involving some 600 troops is set to expire, a report said Saturday. Tokyo has yet to answer Washington's request, but a senior Japanese official said another extension of the mission, Japan's first military deployment since 1945 to a country at war, will be "inevitable" if US-led multinational forces stay in Iraq beyond next year, Kyodo News said, quoting government sources. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, Japan's government spokesman, declined to confirm the report, but said Tokyo would make its own decision about the Iraq mission. "Japan will not do things only because other countries ask us. We will make a decision independently," Hosoda told a political meeting Saturday. On Friday, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said the government would not withdraw troops after a roadside explosion damaged a travelling Japanese military vehicle in the southern Iraq city of Samawa on Thursday. No one was injured in the blast but it put the officially pacifist country on alert. Kyodo also said Saturday that Japan's defense agency was expected to resist calls for extending the Iraq mission given Thursday's explosion. |
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