The Atlantic alliance sidestepped a dispute between France and the United States about who should command the training mission, leaving this decision until after the advance party reports back in September.

De Hoop Scheffer said a team of 40 officers would be sent very quickly to Iraq, adding "it is the nucleus of the enlarged training mission."

The team would "get right to work," he told journalists.

"Today, the North Atlantic Council reached an agreement on the establishment of a NATO training implementation mission in Iraq," De Hoop Scheffer said later in a statement.

The mission tasks included "establishing appropriate liaison arrangements with the Iraqi interim government and the multinational force."

They would also cover working with the Iraqis "to develop their structures, in particular in the ministry of defense and military headquarters."

The mission would help to identify Iraqi personnel for training outside Iraq and develop on an urgent basis more detailed proposals for NATO training.

"The training mission will be a distinct mission, under the political control of NATO," the Secretary General's statement went on: "It will be closely coordinated with the multinational force."

De Hoop Scheffer brokered the compromise Friday that overcame days of deadlock between the United States and France.

A NATO official said earlier the main sticking point in the three days of talks here had been the issue of the unity of command, which France was opposing because of its "political significance", but which the United States wanted for military reasons.

The United States said that, for the sake of military efficiency, the training mission should come under the US-led coalition force already in Iraq.

But France, a leading opponent of last year's invasion, is against any move which would allow the coalition to fly the North Atlantic Treaty Organization flag.

The 26 NATO envoys Friday de facto postponed until September any decision on the thorny question of links between the NATO mission and the US-led multinational force on the ground in Iraq.

Welcoming Friday's decision, US NATO envoy Nicholas Burns said the advance team could be in Iraq in eight to 10 days.

"In essence, symbolically, we plant our flag and we will do that symbolically and figuratively," he said: "Absolutely, it's a NATO mission. It's not a fact-finding mission. It's a long-term mission".

A French diplomatic source also declared saitsfaction with the agreed text: "It does not in any way predetermine the command arrangements," the source said. These will be decided later.

But the source added: "The United States wanted a double hat and they didn't get it."

NATO agreed in principle at a summit in Istanbul last month to provide training to Iraqi forces after the formal handover of powers to an interim government in Baghdad, but summit leaders left details to be hammered out.

A NATO military delegation led by US admiral Gregory Johnson went to Iraq this month to study options for the mission.

Iraq's interim Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, part of the Iraqi administration which took over in June, has urged NATO to quickly make good on its promise to train security forces.

Zebari said earlier this month Iraqi authorities were "in a race against the clock" in their effort to ensure stability.

Crime has soared in Iraq following the US-led invasion, with convicts released by ex-leader Saddam Hussein fueling insecurity while politically-motivated kidnappings of foreign nationals soar.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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