Coalition nations departing Iraq

By Joe Sterling
CNN
(CNN) - The U.S.-led coalition in Iraq is swiftly dwindling as security and stability return to the country, and by January, only the United States and five other nations are likely to remain, a top military officer said.

"The security situation has stabilized quite a bit and it allows the coalition as such to change," said Brig. Gen. Nicolas Matern, a deputy commander for Multi-National Corps-Iraq and a Canadian officer embedded with the U.S. military.

The United States and Britain have been the two major members of the coalition, have the largest contingents there - at 146,000 and 4,000 troops respectively - and have been the ones primarily engaged in combat.

They were among the 35 nations that contributed troops to Iraq during the war - mostly to the Multi-National Force-Iraq and some to the separate NATO and U.N. missions, Matern told CNN in a phone interview from Baghdad.

The number of non-U.S. foreign troops peaked at more than 25,000 earlier in the nearly six-year conflict, but they now number a bit more than 6,000. So far this year alone, Poland, Armenia, Mongolia, Georgia, Latvia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kazakhstan and South Korea have departed Iraq.