A British soldier patrols a road in Basra, 550 km (340 miles) south of Baghdad, February 21, 2007. Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair will on Wednesday announce a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq just as thousands of additional U.S. troops are arriving there to try to restore order in Baghdad. [Reuters]

LONDON - Britain, the main US ally in Iraq, announced a major troop withdrawal from the country even as the United States sends in thousands of extra soldiers to douse the raging insurgency.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Wednesday the British force in southern Iraq would drop from 7,100 to 5,500 in coming months and could fall below 5,000 this year.

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Denmark also said its 430 ground troops would leave by August while Lithuania and Latvia said they were considering reducing their smaller troop contingents there.

The move by Britain, with the largest component of the US-led force in Iraq after the United States, carried major consequences for Washington's troubled war effort.

Blair has faced huge domestic pressure over the unpopular war but he would not give a timetable for a complete British withdrawal.

"The UK military presence will continue into 2008 for as long as we are wanted and have a job to do," the prime minister told the British parliament.

British, Danish and other multinational troops have been concentrated around the southern city of Basra, which Blair said remains "dangerous" but had improved enough for security to be handed over to Iraqi forces.

"What all this means is not that Basra is how we want it to be, but it does mean that the next chapter in Basra's history can be written by Iraqis.

"Increasingly our role will be supporting training and our numbers will be able to reduce accordingly," he said.

In an announcement carefully coordinated with Britain, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that Danish troops would leave southern Iraq in August and be replaced by a helicopter unit of 50 soldiers.

Rasmussen said later on Danish television that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had told him that Iraqi forces were ready to take responsibility for security in southern Iraq.

Blair's unwavering support for US President George W. Bush over the US-led invasion in March 2003 has undermined his support at home. Britain put 40,000 troops into the invasion.

The announcement threw the spotlight on Bush's strategy in Iraq, which has come under attack from the Democrat-controlled Congress, and raised the specter of a possible security vacuum with unrest spreading to the south of Iraq.

Senate Democratic Majority leader Harry Reid said the British government had "acknowledged a reality" which Bush "still stubbornly refuses to accept," as he deploys more American soldiers to Iraq.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied that the US-led coalition was crumbling.

"The coalition remains intact and in fact the British still have thousands of soldiers deployed in Iraq, in the south," Rice said in Berlin.

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