The contractor the US government has hired to oversee the transition here, Texas-based KBR, issued new employee identification cards to allow the staff to return to their posts as early as Thursday.

KBR set up a processing facility at the village school in Rumaila and more than 100 Southern Oil Co. employees arrived to pick up their ID cards.

Some 700 people worked in the Rumaila fields before the war.

The workers who arrived Wednesday had already been screened by civil affairs officers of the British army which controls this southern sector of Iraq.

The screening was undertaken to weed out any remnants of Saddam Hussein's Baath party and other elements that might have been considered a security threat.

"I think they've done a great job and I have no concerns about security," said Brigadier General Robert Crear of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

"As long as people are here to be employed, we will keep trying to get them back to work," he said.

KBR officials told AFP that they would not be able to process all the people who had shown up at the school.

"I just want to get back to work," said Ismail Taher Ghafel, an inventory specialist in Rumaila.

Workers were not told how much they would be paid and both US and KBR officials said their future salaries remained to be determined after their pay histories and professional positions had been verified.

Before the 1991 Gulf War, the Rumailah oil field, which straddles the Iraq-Kuwait border, produced up to 1.2 million barrels of oil a day, according to industry sources.

Southern Oil Co. supervised Iraq's oil exports under a UN programme under which Iraq is allowed to sell oil to buy certain basic supplies under strict supervision.

The UN Security Council adopted resolution 1472 on March 28 to allow the resumption of humanitarian aid for Iraq through its oil-for-food programme.

The programme had been suspended on March 18 just before the coalition launched its war on the Baghdad regime.

An estimated 60 percent of the Iraqi population of 25 million depends on the programme for daily supplies.

SPACE.WIRE