TOKYO,(Saba)-The first batch of Japan's main army contingent was set to depart on Tuesday for Iraq on the country's first military mission to a de facto war zone since World War II, as the opposition boycotted parliament over the dispatch.
About 80 Japanese soldiers assigned to help rebuild Iraq took off from the northern island of Hokkaido on Tuesday, inaugurating the main part of Japan's highly contested mission.
The rest of the main contingent of nearly 600 members of the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF), as the army is known, is expected to depart in three waves beginning later in February.
The dispatch has divided public opinion and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government is bracing for the possibility that the military may suffer its first casualties since World War II.