BANJA LUKA,Bosnia-Hercegovina - British troops began withdrawing from Bosnia on Wednesday after 15 years of helping to keep the peace in the war-torn Balkan country. “We have got about a 100 soldiers leaving today,” British Lieutenant Helen Munro told AFP, adding the first group were mostly from the Welsh Guards, a prominent infantry regiment.The pull-out of the entire British contingent of 600 troops in Bosnia was announced last month as part of the European Union’s plans to cut its number of EUFOR peacekeepers in the country to 2,500 from 6,500. EUFOR, which took over from a NATO peacekeeping mission in 2004, is charged with carrying out military tasks set out in the Dayton peace accords that ended the Bosnian war in 1995.
The majority of the British contingent has been based in Banja Luka, the administrative centre of BosniaÂ’s Serb entity, Republika Srpska.