West piles pressure on Iraq in bid to flush out arms

BAGHDAD - Western officials plan steps today to maintain diplomatic and propaganda pressure on Iraq as UN weapons experts launch a fifth day of hectic inspections that have so far gone with barely a hitch.

Stressing that their mission is still in its early days, the inspectors say they have found no evidence of banned weapons programmes and encountered no obstruction by Iraqi authorities seemingly eager to avoid any clash that might hasten war.

But a low-intensity air war has, in a sense, already begun, military analysts say.

Western planes bombed southern Iraq yesterday, in the latest of scores of air raids which analysts say serve to soften up Iraq's air defences.

Iraqi officials said the bombing killed four people at oil company offices in Basra. The US military insisted its planes had launched "precision-guided" weapons at Iraqi air defences and that they always took pains to avoid hitting civilians.

Keen to justify the threat of a fullscale US-led attack, the British Government, Washington's staunchest military ally, said it would release a dossier of oppression in President Saddam Hussein's Iraq today.

"The dossier makes for harrowing reading, with accounts of torture, rape and other horrific human rights abuses," said advance extracts of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's speech.

"It makes it clear these are carried out as part of the deliberate policy of the regime."

US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is leading a US delegation on a little-publicised visit to Nato offices in Brussels and to key military allies Britain and Turkey.

US officials described the trip as part of consultations "to ensure Iraq complies with Security Council Resolution 1441 and other relevant UN resolutions".

Thousands of people marched through Istanbul yesterday to say no to war.

Turkey allows US warplanes to fly from an airbase in the south to patrol a no-fly zone over northern Iraq set up after the 1991 Gulf War, and would be a likely launchpad for Western forces in another conflict.

UN experts were to spend a fifth day criss-crossing Iraq in vehicle convoys to make surprise visits to sites suspected or known in the past to be linked to nuclear, chemical, biological or missile programmes.

International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei said experts had found no incriminating evidence yet.

"We are off to a good start but we are far from being able to reach a conclusion," he told the BBC.

Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told the Madrid newspaper El Pais his team had met no "impediments".

The Iraqi official newspaper al-Thawra said yesterday the inspections would prove Iraq was free of banned weapons, but that might not be enough to avert war.

- REUTERS

Herald feature: Iraq