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UNITED NATIONS - Iraq is nearly in civil war and could fall into civil war unless urgent steps are taken to prevent this, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today in a rare comment on the situation in Iraq.
"Given the developments on the ground, unless something is done drastically and urgently to arrest the deteriorating situation, we could be there. In fact we are almost there," Annan told reporters in response to a question.
He made the comment hours before a planned conversation with the Iraq Study Group, a US panel co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker that is preparing proposed new policy options on Iraq for the George W. Bush administration.
The group has previously conferred with Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown and Ashraf Qazi, Annan's special representative for Iraq, UN chief spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
"They are asking to talk to him and he's talking to them," Dujarric said, adding they would confer by telephone.
The United Nations has been playing only a minor role in Iraq since the truck-bombing of its Baghdad headquarters in August 2003 in an attack that killed 22 people including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN mission chief in the country.
Annan, whose second five-year term as Secretary-General runs out at the end of the year, has previously made waves by stating in December 2004 that the US-led invasion of Iraq was illegal as it was not approved by the UN Security Council.
Apart from regularly appealing for an end to violence in Iraq, he said in mid-September that civil war was possible in Iraq "if current patterns of alienation and violence persist much longer" and that Middle East leaders were divided over whether the multinational force in Iraq should pull out or stay.
- REUTERS
