Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico described during a visit to Dublin yesterday how his Iraqi counterpart pleaded with him to remove Slovak troops from the country because the presence of foreign forces was causing so much instability.
Mr Fico told The Irish Times about a meeting he had with the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, during a recent trip to Iraq.
"It was shocking that he asked me: 'Prime minister, please take your soldiers and go home, because the presence of the foreign armies is probably the most sensitive issue for all people in Iraq.'"
Elected as head of a three-party coalition last July, Mr Fico was opposed to the Iraqi war from the start.
He said that a 99-strong engineering unit of the Slovak army was being withdrawn from Iraq in February, which would leave only 11 officers remaining.
A Slovakian soldier was killed in a roadside bomb attack south of Baghdad at the weekend and Mr Fico said this was creating problems, not just for the Slovak presence in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan.
There is a Slovak engineering unit in the Afghan capital, Kabul, but there is a proposal to transfer it to Kandahar, which Mr Fico described as "the most dangerous part of Afghanistan".
His government would have to decide whether to allow this transfer to go ahead. "Of course the death of the soldier in Iraq will influence our decision very much."
His party, Direction-Social Democracy (Smer), had "very much opposed" the war from the beginning. "It seems to us that the situation in Iraq is even more dangerous than it used to be in the past, because of the presence of foreign armies."
On the ratification of the European constitutional treaty, Mr Fico said his country's parliament had already done so, but he expressed an openness to other approaches, such as the French idea for a shortened or "mini" treaty, if the current ratification process was "really dead".
He gave conditional support to further enlargement of the European Union to include the Ukraine or countries in the western Balkans. "Our condition is that these countries must be well prepared, that's all." This also applied to Turkey.
"If Turkey is going to meet all conditions of EU membership, there is no reason to stop Turkey from being a member state."