Britain Estimates on Pullout

Britain’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said Sunday that he expected British troops to leave Iraq within the next two years.

In recent months, more than a dozen countries have announced that they will pull out or scale back their troop presence in the country. But Britain, which has 8,000 soldiers in southern Iraq, had not indicated any plans to leave.

Straw said he did not expect a withdrawal this year.

“I hope it will be next year or some time the year after,” he told Britain’s ITV television. “We are already rebuilding the Iraqi security forces. They have taken over security in many regions of the country.

“When the Iraqi government says to us, ‘We want you to go,’ we will go, and I think it will be some time in the next two years,” Straw said.

A majority of Britons opposed the Iraq war, but a poll released this week showed that only 3% of voters said Iraq was the most important issue in the May 5 national election.