BULGARIA/IRAQ: Bulgaria announced yesterday that it would recall about a quarter of its troops from Iraq in June and decide this month whether to bring them all home by the end of the year.
Opinion polls show that more than 70 per cent of Bulgarians oppose the deployment of their 450 troops in the Gulf, and discontent is only growing after US soldiers accidentally shot dead a Bulgarian in Iraq last week.
Seven of his countrymen have also died since the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.
Defence minister Nikolai Svinarov said 100 troops would come home in June, and the government of former king Simeon Saxe-Coburg would decide in the coming weeks whether to bow to public and political pressure and withdraw all Bulgarian troops by 2006.
The leaders of former eastern bloc countries that joined Nato last year have been some of Washington's staunchest allies in Iraq, mostly in the face of public opposition. The Baltic states, with the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, have a total of about 1,500 troops in Iraq, serving in various capacities.
But the two biggest east European contributors of manpower to the US effort, Poland and Ukraine, are expected to withdraw their servicemen by the end of the year.
Ukraine has about 1,600 men in Iraq, slightly fewer than Poland.