Troops could stay in Iraq beyond 2005

A British soldier attached to the Black Watch searches an Iraqi man at a check-point in the desert near camp Dogwood, 45km south of Baghdad Sunday. The British forces stepped up security and changed their check-point procedures after rising incidents of suicide bombing. PHOTO: AFP

General Sir Mike Jackson's remarks in the Independent newspaper come three weeks after British troops were deployed for the first time to a hotspot near Baghdad to support the US takeover of the rebel-stronghold of Fallujah.

Iraq's transition process, under way since June, specifies December 2005 as the end of the foreign military coalition's mandate, but Jackson, without giving any date, said the British deployment was "event-driven".

"How long we stay there is going to be event-driven," Jackson said.

The recent redeployment by the Black Watch regiment away from the relatively safe British-held area around Basra further angered a public expressing growing opposition to the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

All the British operations had been in the southern area of Basra "until this one-off deployment of the Black Watch," Jackson told the Independent.

"That is not to say, in the future, there may not be a military requirement of the coalition as a whole for a British unit or units to be elsewhere," Jackson said.

The Black Watch would be pulled back within a few weeks and would not be replaced at Camp Dogwood, the area where they have been deployed near Baghdad, he added.