Eleven countries from the region feature on Washington's list of allies "in the coalition for the immediate disarmanent of Iraq", as opposed to only six from the European Union.

They are Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has conceded however that these states do not bring "significant military contributions" to the war effort.

"The support of many of these countries consist of simple political declarations," he said.

In all, eastern Europe only has 54 soldiers involved in ground operations in Iraq alongside more than 100,000 British and US troops.

The 54 are all members of an elite Polish parachute brigade and have been deployed to secure Iraqi oil installations.

Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller confirmed last week that they had seen action in the fiercely contested southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr.

Some 600 other soldiers from Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia have been deployed in the region but are not fighting on the frontlines.

Most of them belong to nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) defense units and have not been called upon so far.

It means that on the ground it is hard to distinguish the region that has been hailed by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the "new Europe" from what his "old Europe", represented by France and Germany, who bitterly opposed military intervention in Iraq.

Some east European countries on Washington's list of allies have even gone as far as stating that they are not at war with Iraq.

"Hungary is not at war, it is not involved in the conflict," said Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy, whose government has not deployed troops in the Gulf.

"We are not members of Operation Iraqi Freedom," Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla echoed.

Prague has deployed 357 NBC defense experts in Kuwait at the request of the United States, but in the absence of a UN mandate for the war, this unit does not have orders from the Czech parliament to intervene in Iraq.

They only have authorization to launch humanitarian rescue operations in case Iraq were to use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Slovakia has sent 59 soldiers to join the Czech battalion and they share the same mandate, because the parliament has refused to back up Christian-Democrat Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda and his government's staunch support for the United States.

The eastern European leaders' reluctance to go beyond words of support has much to with the strong anti-war sentiment among the people of the region.

In most of the countries opinion polls have shown that between 60 and 90 percent of the population oppose the war in Iraq.

In Budapest, Warsaw, Bratislava and Sofia thousands have gathered in the streets to protest against the war, even if the demonstrations were not on the same scale as those in London, Paris and Madrid.

In Slovenia, public sentiment forced Prime Minister Anton Rop to back-track after he signed a letter by 10 eastern and central European countries, many of whom hope to join NATO, in support of US policy in February.

Since then Rop has declined to join the war coalition and ignored a US request for military transfer rights over Slovenian territory.

SPACE.WIRE