SYDNEY: Keeping to his election promise, Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd on Friday said Australian combat troops will be pulled out of Iraq by the middle of 2008.
Rudd, who led his centre-left Australian Labor Party to an overwhelming victory in the elections last week, will be sworn in as Australia's 26th prime minister on Monday.
In a marked shift from the defeated Conservative Prime Minister John Howard's policy to support the US-led war in Iraq, Rudd said he would meet US Ambassador Robert McCallum soon to discuss the precise timing of troop withdrawal.
Australia, along with Britain and the US, was part of the `Coalition of the Willing' in the US-led war to oust Saddam Hussein in early 2003.
Speaking on a local radio channel in Melbourne, Rudd said, "The combat force in Iraq, we would have home by around the middle of next year."
"We've not begun our discussions with the US on that. We'll have a meeting with the United States ambassador before too long to set up the appropriate processes for discussing that," he added.
Iraq has been one of the key election issues. Allaying fears that the withdrawal of troops would damage bilateral ties with the US, the very next day of becoming prime minister-elect, Rudd announced that he would visit Washington early next year.
Earlier this week, McCallum told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio, "It's a situation where Australia is determining how it is going to reposition forces and how it is going to deploy its resources in a new and different way, and we are looking forward to working with Mr. Rudd in achieving that."
"There are going to be Australian troops left in Iraq as security forces that relate to the Australian embassy in Baghdad, there are naval forces and air forces that are offshore that relate to security issues."
In 2003, Howard had sent 2,000 troops to Iraq and about 1,600 remain in and around the country. Howard had refused to set a timetable for pulling out troops, saying that it would bolster terrorists worldwide if the US-led forces were defeated in Iraq.
Australia also has about 1,000 troops in Afghanistan, a deployment Rudd supports and has no plans to reduce.
Meanwhile, on climate change, McCallum told AFP that the US had no plan to follow the new government. "There is no chance that the United States is going to ratify the Kyoto Protocol," he said.
