February 23, 2003	Sunday	Zul Hijjah 21, 1423

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BERLIN, Feb 22: Mohamed ElBaradei, the United Nations’ chief nuclear weapons inspector, has told a German magazine that he sees Iraq making progress towards complying with the UN, and said he could not rule out resigning if the United States launched a military assault.

In an interview to be published on Monday in the weekly Der Spiegel, ElBaradei said Iraq’s level of cooperation with the arms inspectors had improved in recent days.

“It has been cooperating better and better with us in the past few days... There is still a chance for peace,” said ElBaradei, who heads the UN’s Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency and is currently on a visit to Iran. Asked if he might consider resigning if the United States went ahead and attacked Iraq without a UN mandate, he said: “I don’t go in for those kind of thoughts, but at the same time I can’t rule anything out.”

“It (the Iraqi government) appears to have understood how serious the situation is,” he told Der Spiegel. ElBaradei’s comments were translated into English from the German version given in the magazine.—AFP