A five-member team of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived in Baghdad January 21 to carry out the first routine inspection of Iraq's uranium stockpile in more than a year.

The inspections are part of world-wide monitoring of nuclear facilities by the Vienna-based UN agency and are not directly related to the stormy UN campaign to disarm Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War.

IAEA said earlier this month that although all weapon-usable materials have been removed from Iraq in accordance with UN resolutions adopted after the Gulf War, Iraq still has about 1.8 tons of low enriched uranium and several tons of natural and depleted uranium.

This IAEA team is to conduct its mission in line with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and has the limited objective of verifying the nuclear materials, said IAEA.

UN weapons inspections in Iraq, of which IAEA was in charge of the nuclear file, have been suspended since December 1998 when the USand Britain launched an air campaign against Iraqi targets to retaliate what they said Iraq's non-cooperation with inspectors.

Iraq's cooperation with IAEA had been smooth before the US-British air war against it, and IAEA declared in its report to the UN Security Council in October 1998 that it had found no evidence that Iraq had produced nuclear weapons.

The IAEA team is scheduled to begin its work at the end of this week and return to Vienna by the end of the month.

The UN Security Council adopted the resolution 1284 last December requiring Iraq to allow a new arms control body to return to the country in exchange of possible suspension of the sanctions imposed on Iraq following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The resolution has yet to be implemented amid rejection from Iraq and differences within the Security Council over choosing the head of the new regime -- the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). (Xinhua)