In a bid to have the Ground Self-Defense Force troops withdrawn from Iraq, opposition parties jointly submitted a bill Thursday to the Diet to scrap the special law allowing the deployment in the war-torn country.
The opposition's move came in response to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's rejection of their demand to pull out the troops from the southern Iraq city of Samawah when their one-year mission expires Dec. 14.
The law, enacted by the Diet last year, allows the government to deploy Self-Defense Forces troops to "noncombat zones" in Iraq.
Although Iraq's provisional government has declared a nationwide state of emergency, Koizumi says Samawah remains a noncombat zone and has indicated the government will keep the troops there beyond Dec. 14.
Representatives from the Democratic Party of Japan, the Japanese Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party said they introduced the bill to force the GSDF withdrawal.
The government "must let the SDF get out of Iraq, and we're determined to have the bill passed in the ongoing Diet session," DPJ Secretary General Tatsuo Kawabata said in a joint news conference Thursday with senior opposition party leaders.
The Diet affairs chiefs of the three parties submitted the bill to House of Representatives Speaker Yohei Kono later in the afternoon.