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South Korea
Troop Contribution: 3,600
In June 2004, South Korea announced that it would send 3,000 soldiers to the Irbil area in northern Iraq. Some 600 South Korean military medics and engineers already in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah were to redeploy to Irbil to join the larger force.
Their August 2004 deployment made South Korea the largest coalition partner after the United States and Britain. Seoul has portrayed the deployment as a way of strengthening its alliance with the United States, thereby winning more support from Washington for a peaceful end to a long-running dispute over North Korea's nuclear weapons development. On Dec. 31, 2004, the South Korean Parliament approved a one-year extension of the mission.
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