El Salvador to send 50 more troops to Lebanon, exit Iraq
El Salvador will send another 50 soldiers to join the UN force in Lebanon, doubling its deployment there to support the "fight against terrorism," President Antonio Saca said Thursday.
The UN force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, was set up in 1978 to monitor the border between Israel and southern Lebanon, and was beefed up to a 13,000-strong force in the wake of the 2006 war between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas.
"El Salvador believes in this fight against terrorism," Saca told journalists in La Hachadura, on the border with Guatemala, as he announced he had authorized 50 soldiers to join 52 of their compatriots already in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the defense ministry said that 200 Salvadoran soldiers had finished their mission in Iraq and would travel to Kuwait, from where US forces would transfer them home.
Saca had announced his country”s pullout from Iraq on December 23, more than five years after Salvadoran troops were first deployed there.
The tiny Central American nation is a staunch ally of the United States, which backed the country”s right-wing government in a bloody civil war that ended in 1992.