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Poland on Thursday confirmed that Spain had agreed to send its 8,000 peacekeeping soldiers to Iraq under the command of a Polish general.
"Only one person can be a division commander ... and his name is General Andrzej Tyszkiewicz," Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski told reporters at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels when attending a meeting of NATO defense ministers.
"The deputies will be from Spain, Ukraine and Poland," he added.
The United States asked Poland and Britain to each run one of the four zones in Iraq in return for the two's strong backing for the US-led war in Iraq.
According to Spain's El Mundo newspaper, Poland and Spain had agreed to command the force on a rotating basis.
But Szmajdzinski said Spain would lead one of the three brigades under the overall Polish command, and Spain would send some 1,100 troops to Iraq with additional forces from Honduras, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador.
Ukraine would run another brigade, deploying 1,700 of its own troops, and Poland would put 2,300 into the third along with forces from Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Troops are scheduled to be deployed in late July or early August, and all the divisions would realize their operational capacity around Sept. 1, according to Szmajdzinski.
(Xinhua News Agency June 13, 2003)
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