Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said Tuesday that more than 6,000 volunteers had reached Iraq from the Arab world, while senior Iraqi officials made similar statements over the weekend

While it is difficult to confirm these figures, reports have come in from Cairo to Stockholm of Arabs volunteering to join the battle in Iraq.

In Lebanon over the past three days, witnesses said hundreds of young people had headed to Iraq to fight. The Lebanese branch of Syria's ruling Baath party announced Monday that its offices were open for volunteers to come forward.

An Iraqi embassy official in Sweden, Jamal Abbulraka, told AFP that "more than 1,000" Iraqis living there, as well as in Denmark and Norway, had contacted the embassy to return to Iraq to fight.

And in Egypt, Iraq's Arab league representative Mohsen Khalil said a "large number" of volunteers were contacting the Iraqi embassy in the hope of going to Iraq.

In Beirut on Monday thirty-six Arabs, mostly Lebanese and Palestinians aged between 19 and 25, mounted a bus after obtaining visas at the Iraqi embassy and headed to Iraq where they vowed to die as "martyrs".

One of them, Nureddin Abbud As-Seyyed, a 33-year-old Lebanese father of three, said "we will defend all Arab lands, from Baghdad to Al-Quds Jerusalem," when asked why he was going.

The embassy's press attache, Nuri Tamimi, said their decision to go was "a natural reaction of self-defense, because the battle for Iraq is the battle of all the Arabs."

However, on Tuesday Tamimi told AFP there were no other volunteers lined up to head to Iraq at the moment.

A senior Palestinian official in Lebanon said the same day that hundreds of Palestinian volunteers had left to Iraq "to fight on the sides of the Iraqi people against the American-British invaders."

"Hundreds of fighters from the popular army, created in 1997, have already been sent to Iraq through bordering countries," said Munir Maqdah, head of the armed wing of the mainstream Fatah faction in south Lebanon.

In a rare media confirmation of the reports, Qatar's Al-Jazeera satellite television on Sunday showed a group of Syrians who had arrived in the northern city of Mosul to join the resistance.

The Palestinian radical movement Islamic Jihad said the same day it had sent a first batch of suicide bombers to Baghdad to fight the US and British invading forces.

The trip to Baghdad is a risky one however, notably after US Central Command in Doha announced Monday that US forces would not allow anyone to enter western Iraq or cross the borders into this region.

A Palestinian man of Danish nationality, who volunteered to fight in Iraq, died in a Baghdad hospital Sunday after being injured on the road from the Syrian border to Baghdad. The bus he was in was attacked by a US Apache helicopter, his family said.

Thaer Hussein Othman, 28, was buried in Beirut's Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp on Tuesday.

Another Palestinian from Lebanon was killed in a coalition missile strike on March 20, the day the war started.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi embassy in Berlin said "some volunteers" -- Egyptians, Lebanese, Moroccans and Palestinians -- had obtained visas to fight in Iraq, and that some Iraqis had returned home for that purpose.

Similarly in Algeria, the embassy said lots of volunteers were coming forward. Some 15 enthusiastic young would-be volunteers gathered outside the embassy in Algiers Monday, but complained they could not afford to pay their way to Iraq.

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