November 12, 2005 - 10:50 AM

Annan in Iraq for first post-Saddam visit

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan arrived in Baghdad on Saturday for his first visit to Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a U.N. spokeswoman said.

The United Nations has been operating at greatly reduced levels in the country since international staffers were withdrawn in October 2003 after two bombings at its Baghdad offices.

Annan's Iraq envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was among 22 people killed in a truck bombing at the former U.N. headquarters in August 2003.

Iraqi officials have been pressing the United Nations for months to significantly increase its involvement in humanitarian, political and reconstruction activities.

Annan was due to meet Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and several other senior political leaders, including former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and U.N. staff working in Iraq.

The secretary-general was in Amman on Friday, where he discussed Wednesday's deadly bombings in three hotels in the Jordanian capital, which al Qaeda in Iraq said was carried out by four Iraqis.

His previously unannounced visit follows separate trips by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the past few days.

It also comes three days after a panel ruled Annan had erred in firing mid-level U.N. aide Joseph Stephanides, the sole U.N. official to be dismissed for alleged misconduct in the scandal-tainted oil-for-food plan for Iraq.

U.N. staff numbers in Iraq have been slowly increasing. The current staff ceiling in Baghdad is about 260, including some 150 troops from Fiji, deployed to guard U.N. staff and facilities.

Other U.N. staffers work on Iraqi programmes from offices in New York and neighbouring Jordan.

The U.N. mission in Iraq also opened two offices outside Baghdad late last year. It has about six staff each at offices in the southern city of Basra and Arbil in the north.