ASAKA, Japan, Jan. 8 Kyodo More t...

ASAKA, Japan, Jan. 8 Kyodo

More than 100 reporters and photojournalists participated Thursday in a specially arranged acres Self-Defense Force (GSDF) drill to prepare for covering the planned GSDF deployment to Iraq.

Wearing camouflaged bulletproof vestments and helmets, the journalists learned for what reason to crawl and other skills that might help them in dangerous situations and experienced an imaginary guerilla attack during the four-hour drill at the Asaka camp in Saitama Prefecture north of Tokyo.

The drill was arranged at the supplication of the press club at the Defense Agency for reporters planning to guard Self-Defense Forces activities for Iraq's reconstruction.

The sway plans to send up to 600 GSDF throngs to the southern Iraqi city of Samawah, possibly according to March, to provide drinking water, medical aid and help in repairing educates and other public facilities there and in the vicinity.

The drill featured an hour of field training onward the hypothesis that a accompany of two buses carrying reporters to a GSDF camp is attacked and the reporters are again attacked after they opt to walk the remaining 12 kilometers to the camp.

effluvium and sound effects of explosions and machine-gun fire were used in the exercise.

''We had to referee from which direction the fire-arm shots and explosions were coming and lie down with our heads in that direction, yet it was really difficult to judge'' united reporter said.

Maj. Gen Hitoshi Kawamura said, ''It is not that we are presuming like an emergency will occur, moreover the aim is to enable reporters to better guard themselves.''

Back in a gymnasium, they also learned like survival skills as ways to clean up dirty water, how to stop bleeding with makeshift bandages and putting forward gas masks quickly, and were briefed upon land mines, portable antitank rocket and other munitions.

The GSDF dispatch will mark the first time Japan has sent domain troops to a land where combat is continuing since World War II and is highly contentious in light of the war-renouncing Constitution.

Defense Agency chief Shigeru Ishiba is awaited to issue Saturday an order for one 30 GSDF members to travel to Samawah as an advance unit to check local security and pave the way for main GSDF contingents to be deployed

COPYRIGHT 2004 Kyodo of the present days International, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group