IRAQ: Foreign diplomats in Iraq are leaving as the US and Britain prepare for a final diplomatic push to rally support for a possible war.
The Polish diplomat who acts as Washington's sole representative in Iraq, Mr Krzysztof Bernacki, will leave tomorrow "for long consultations in his country," the Polish embassy said.
Other diplomatic sources in Baghdad said the representatives for Yugoslavia and Spain had already gone.
The departures came as Washington and London exerted pressure on reluctant US allies to support a new UN resolution that would underpin a military assault on Iraq.
Faced with the growing threat, Iraq has said it is prepared to meet the demands of UN weapons inspectors, who have been trying to secure Baghdad's agreement on overflights by US spy planes and private interviews with Iraqi scientists.
Chief UN weapons inspector, Dr Hans Blix, is due to go to Baghdad at the weekend for talks after Iraq's ambassador to the UN, Mr Mohamed Al-Douri, said Iraq now had "no objection" to the use of U2 surveillance aircraft.
Mr Hosam Mohammed Amin, who is in charge of Iraqi liaison with the inspectors, said: "We shall do our best to make his visit successful." But President George Bush has warned that Iraq had "weeks, not months" to prove to UN inspectors it had no weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq's ruling Baath Party predicted that Mr Powell's speech to the UN Security Council tomorrow would be "made up of lies and fabrications", said Mr Amin.
"They won't be really proof, they will be fabricated space and aerial photos. If we are given the chance to look at these photos, we will prove they are lies," said Mr Amin.
The information would be designed to justify a conflict, he added, urging the Security Council members to "not give in again to American blackmail".
While promising of increased cooperation with the UN inspectors, a defiant Iraq has meanwhile been making plans to defend itself from a US invasion. President Saddam and senior aides appear to be concentrating on defending Baghdad rather than the whole country - a scenario for street-by-street fighting in a civilian milieu that would be totally unlike the desert campaign of the 1991 Gulf war.
They have also threatened to launch suicide attacks against US nationals in the Middle East if war starts.
Libyan leader Col Muammer Gadafy warned yesterday that terrorists would retaliate and be victorious if the United States attacked Iraq and that Saddam Hussein would rather die than leave his country for exile.
"Terrorism will be victorious if you follow this road, the road of war," Mr Gadafy told reporters in the Ethiopian capital after the first summit of the African Union when asked about the possible consequences of such a conflict.
"Don't believe the lie that says that Saddam Hussein would leave Iraq. He would stay or die in Iraq," he added.