Iraqi leadership talks tough

The Iraqi regime said that Hans Blix and his team, who arrived yesterday, will find no weapons of mass destruction - warning that it is prepared if Washington decides on war nonetheless.

Its threats came as the White House said the condition for war may already have been met by Iraq’s attempts to down US and British jets patrolling the no-fly zone.

Mr Blix, who will be leading a 100-strong weapons inspection team, arrived with an advance party yesterday - amid reports that a group of Iraqi weapons scientists have already fled the country.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said Mr Blix represented Saddam’s last hope for peace. "Our message is: This is your final opportunity to comply with international law and the rule of the UN Security Council," he said.

Mr Blix was joined in Baghdad by Mohamed El Baradei, who oversees the UN’s nuclear weapons watchdog, and the two met Iraqi officials in a two-hour meeting they later described as "constructive".

The language of Iraqi ministers was, however, far more belligerent. A front-page editorial in Iraq’s state-run newspaper called the previous UN inspection programme "an American organisation to spy on Iraq", and said the new team must not do the same.

Izzat Ibrahim, vice-chairman of Saddam’s Revolutionary Command, yesterday said that any aggression from the West would meet a brutal response from Baghdad.

"We will fight them on every inch of Iraq’s soil and every Iraqi will fight them," he told a meeting of Iraqi expatriates in Baghdad. "It will be a fight that befits Iraqis’ history, the glory of their nation and the depth of their beliefs."

Last night, British and US warplanes renewed their attack on Saddam’s military bases in northern Iraq, in the second day of response to an attack on their aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone.

The Iraqi military said the bombs had hit "civilian" targets in Nineveh province, 250 miles north of Baghdad. There were no reports of casualties.

A spokesman for President George Bush said Iraqi’s weekend decision to fire on US troops "appears to be a violation" of the latest UN resolution. This would be, by implication, a trigger for war - but the White House did not make this point. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said the UN Security Council would decide on the legality of the Iraqi attack.

Bombings in the no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq have been a regular event, but the new resolution suggests they will now be seen as a "material breach" of Saddam’s obligations to the UN.

It remains unclear, however, whether the other 13 Security Council members would agree, as the patrols were never explicitly authorised by the UN.

Although UN inspectors have broad powers to investigate Saddam’s weapons programmes, Mr Blix himself admitted that he may not be able to exercise all of them - saying, for example, that it may be impossible to take Iraqi scientists out of the country for interviews. Iraq’s ambassador to the UN has told diplomats that Baghdad will not tolerate the "forced" or "paid" defection of large numbers of scientists.