British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett on Thursday welcomed U.S. President George Bush's decision to send more troops to Iraq, but said that Britain had no intention to increase its troops there.

"We welcome that and we hope that this joint effort to resolve this very difficult security situation will indeed succeed," Beckett told reporters before a cabinet meeting.

Beckett, however, said that Britain had no plans "at the present time" to send more troops to Iraq.

"It is not our intention at the present time to send more troops," said Beckett, adding "we're not in the same position" in southern Iraq as the United States in the rest of the country.

She said Britain had been "progressively handing over responsibility to Iraqi forces and to Iraqi police."

On Wednesday night, Bush announced that he had ordered 21,500 additional American troops to Iraq, as part of his new Iraq strategy.

Asked about the report by The Daily Telegraph on Thursday saying Britain would withdraw nearly 3,000 troops from southern Iraq by the end of May, Beckett said that "the Telegraph may speculate about timing and so on, but it does depend on how things go in Basra."

The report also said British Prime Minister Tony Blair would announce the decision "within the next fortnight," in a bid to let the overstretched troops recover from four years of battle.

The prime minister's office and the Ministry of Defense have denied the report.

Britain, the staunchest ally of the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has the second largest number of troops in the battered country. Currently Britain has some 7,000 troops in southern Iraq, mostly in the Basra area. Since 2003 there have been 128 British soldiers killed in Iraq.

Source: Xinhua