Poland scaled back its military commitment in Iraq yesterday in response to Tuesday's devastating attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad

Under a hastily agreed new formula for the occupation, Polish troops will withdraw from a "high-risk area" near Baghdad, leaving the territory to come under the command of US forces, Polish Foreign Ministry officials revealed. "We have ceded 1,000 square kilometres that would have come under the control of the Polish command to the US administration," Tadeusz Iwinski, a senior foreign policy adviser to the Polish Prime Minister, Leszek Miller, told The Independent. Poland is due to take formal charge of the central third of occupied Iraq, sandwiched between the American and the British zones in the north and south, on 1 September. The new Polish-led division will operate in a territory one- quarter the size of Poland (80,000sq km), which includes four predominantly Shia Muslim provinces south of Baghdad now occupied by US Marines. Warsaw has sent more than 1,800 troops to Iraq since the beginning of this month. They will be joined by troops from Spain, Ukraine, Lithuania and a number of Central American countries to form a multinational force of 9,000 soldiers.