The National Assembly voted Thursday to extend the nation's troop deployment in the United Arab Emirates and Somalia for another year to the end of 2013.
Korea has dispatched 310 naval commandos in the Gulf of Aden since 2009 as part of a global effort to tackle piracy in the region. About 150 soldiers have also been based in the eastern region of the UAE, tasked with training the Middle Eastern nation's special operations forces.
Separately, the National Assembly approved a bill to extend the mission of some of its troops protecting aid workers in Afghanistan by one year.
Some 150 Korean aid workers and police officers have been involved in a reconstruction mission in the northern Afghan city of Charikar since mid-2010, protected by some 350 troops of the Ashena unit stationed there.
The approval calls for up to 70 combat troops to remain in Afghanistan to protect aid workers, called the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) for another one-year term to the end of next year, while 289 members of the unit will be pulled out by the end of this year as scheduled.
The move came after the Seoul government agreed to extend the PRT mission by one year to the end of next year. (Yonhap)