The United Nations said it had received up until Thursday pledges totalling 1.2 billion dollars in response to its 2.2-billion dollar aid appeal for Iraq.

According to official statements, the United States and the European Union (EU) have so far committed 435 million dollars and 305 million dollars respectively, for food and humanitarian efforts.

Aid is coming in from everywhere, including poor nations that depend themselves on assistance such as Bangladesh, which announced last Saturday it would send two million dollars of food, medicine, tea, biscuits, drinking water and saline.

But the humanitarian supplies are proving difficult to ferry into Iraq where the food rations, according to the World Food Program (WFP), will run out by May unless they are replenished.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO warned Thursday that war could devastate the rural economy of Iraq at a time when 60 percent of the 25-million population rely entirely on food aid.

The British supply ship Sir Galahad was able to enter Iraq's only deep water port of Umm Qasr last week, but two Australian ships each carrying 50,000 tonnes of wheat were still held up outside waiting for mines to be cleared.

The UN children's fund UNICEF said Wednesday it sent a five-truck convoy carrying humanitarian assistance to Safwan, near the border with Kuwait.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday a convoy carrying medical supplies and water left Kuwait on Friday in an attempt to enter the embattled southern Iraqi city of Basra for the first time.

An 11-member team for WFP and UNICEF also entered Iraq Friday from Kuwait, for the first time since the withdrawal of UN international humanitarian staff, days before the war began on March 20.

The team will assess humanitarian needs in Umm Qasr, the WFP's emergency coordinator for Iraq Russell Ulrey told AFP in Kuwait City.

The move comes as the United Nations reactivated last week the "oil for food" humanitarian programme, suspended with the withdrawal of its staff.

But the diplomatic wrangling continued over the contentious issue of rebuilding Iraq, and indirectly managing its oil wealth.

The EU and Russia are seeking a greater role for the United Nations than Washington is ready to allow.

The EU would only give its full backing to the post-war reconstruction of Iraq if the process was authorised by a UN resolution, Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou, whose country holds the revolving European presidency, said Thursday in Brussels after talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an article published Sunday in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram that the United States and Britain will place Iraq's future oil revenue in a UN-supervised account.

He did not elaborate but his comments seemed to indicate that the coalition will be in charge of the Iraqi oil sector at least for an interim period.

But the head of the UN's development agency (UNDP), Mark Malloch-Brown, said Thursday the United States should not count on oil receipts to finance the near term reconstruction of Iraq.

He insisted that UN intervention is needed to sort out ownership and investor guarantees. "Maybe people in Washington have not seen this corner yet but they will have to realize it," he said.

The legal question of ownership of Iraq's oil is already blocking crude oil stored at Turkey's Ceyhan oil terminal from being sold within the framework of "oil-for-food" programme.

SPACE.WIRE