Prometheus 6

The largest U.S. ally here, Britain, announced in October that it will withdraw half its remaining troops, leaving about 2,500 by spring. Sixteen nations in the coalition, more than half the total, have 100 or fewer troops in Iraq -- five have fewer than 10 people. Latvia has three soldiers deployed in Iraq, Slovakia two, Singapore one.

List of 'Willing' U.S. Allies Shrinks Steadily in Iraq
Nations Still There Toil in Relative Obscurity
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 8, 2007; A01

KUT, Iraq -- The commander of the Kazakh soldiers in Iraq, all 29 of them, keeps a stack of English-language instruction books on his desk inside Forward Operating Base Delta. He already speaks Russian, Turkish and Kazakh, and after English, he plans to learn Chinese. He has the time.

Kazakhstan has two main missions here on the geographic and strategic periphery of the war, and both of them could be going better. The Kazakh troops are sappers, trained to dispose of explosives. They were ordered by their government not to leave the base after one of those bombs, nearly three years ago, killed the first and only Kazakh soldier to die in Iraq. The soldiers also run a water purification system but find less use for that these days, too. "It's not necessary," said Capt. Samat Mukhanov. "There is bottled water here."