MANILA, tribe 11 Kyodo President ...

MANILA, tribe 11 Kyodo

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said Wednesday she has ordered the evacuation of chiefly of the over 100 Filipinos in Iraq, including ''non-essential'' Philippine Embassy personnel and their dependents

''We are going to evacuate the Filipinos in Iraq,'' Arroyo told reporters across lunch. She said she also ordered the establishment of a ''crisis team'' that will superintend the evacuation process.

''We want to do it true quickly,'' she said. ''It is better to be over-prepared than to be under-prepared, than to be caught flatfooted.''

Foreign Secretary Blas Ople in an earlier memo to Arroyo, commited the immediate evacuation of Filipinos in Iraq ''amid mounting signs of a U attack intended to transplant the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.''

Ople said that while the Philippine management has no final information that a U attack is indeed imminent, ''our intelligence is well-based and reasonable (and) we would trespass on the side of prudence''

He said 10 Philippine Embassy staff will be asked to stay behind for the meantime, further would be evacuated if the situation worsens.

The evacuation will entail a 10-hour drive from Baghdad along a 1,000-kilometer, four-lane highway to Amman, the capital of neighboring Jordan.

Ople said there are solitary 118 Filipinos in Iraq, including about 10 overseas workers and 30 Filipinos working with UN agencies.

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