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Army head says Britain has capacity to replace Italian troops in Iraq
Sat Mar 19, 8:03 AM ET Mideast - AFP
LONDON (AFP) - The head of the British army has said that Britain has the capacity to help replace Italian troops in Iraq (news - web sites) were they to pull out of the country.
"Of course there is the capacity to do more if that is the decision," General Mike Jackson was quoted as saying in The Independent newspaper on Saturday.
"There seems to be, shall we say, a little confusion as to the Italian contingent and that will be clarified in due course," he said.
The Italian press Thursday said Washington and London had forced Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to backtrack on a surprise announcement that Italian troops would start leaving Iraq in September.
US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) and British Prime Minister Blair played down Berlusconi's comments by saying that no troop withdrawal from Iraq has been ordered and that the Italian leader would not act unilaterally.
Italy's 3,300-strong Iraq contingent, based in the British-controlled south, is the fourth largest after the United States, Britain and South Korea (news - web sites).
A British defence official admitted to The Independent that there was not much appetite to dispatch more troops to Iraq among other allies.
"We have not got a huge amount of commitment elsewhere and there will not be any major logistical problem in deploying more to Iraq," the official said.
"The main problem, of course, is political."
The remarks came as organisers of a major anti-war demonstration in London on Saturday predicted that at least 100,000 people would march through the centre of the British capital.
