PARIS, Oct 29: Despite the looming US-led air strike on Iraq, 86 leading French companies — in the sectors of construction, pharmaceuticals, petroleum, agriculture and telecommunications — have decided to take part in this year’s international trade fair that is to open Friday in Baghdad.

France would indeed have the most important presence of any country from Europe at this year’s event, followed closely by Germany which, like France, has never hidden its hesitation over taking part in an allied attack on Iraq.

And not only will the French delegation include some of the country’s major companies, it will also have a number of the country’s leading political figures, among them representatives of the France-Iraq friendship associations that have been created in the French Senate and National Assembly, and whose past members include ex-defence minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement — who chose in 1991 to hand in his ministerial portfolio to protest French participation in the Gulf War — and Roselyne Bachelot, President Chirac’s presidential campaign spokesman.

Eric Woerth, a deputy with the ruling UMP (Union pour la Majorite Presidentielle) political party of President Jacques Chirac — who is himself a longtime staunch supporter of Iraq and one of the principal forces opposing a unilateral US attack on Iraq — is expected to head the delegation representing the French Parliament.

Despite recent in-fighting within the friendship group that has resulted in a claim by another UMP deputy, Didier Julia — who had hoped to be named to head the group himself — that in naming Mr. Woerth, who is also the treasurer of the UMP, that the ruling party and notably one of its founders, ex-Prime Minister Alain Juppe, are attempting to take firm control over the group which is expected to play an important role in the eventual attribution of contracts once Iraq’s political future is resolved.

Accusations by Mr. Julia, according to which Mr. Woerth was “brutally imposed” as the head of the France-Iraq friendship group in the French parliament by Mr. Juppe “have no existence in fact,” now says Jacques Barrot, another UMP deputy who is also president of the UMP movement within the National Assembly, who has demanded that Mr. Julia retract his accusations that he characterizes as “irresponsible.”

Another prominent French supporter of Iraq, Senator Aymeri de Montesquiou, a non-UMP member of the France-Iraq group of the French Senate, has, for his part, already made his way to Iraq where prior to the International Trade Fair, he’s chosen to go out into the Kurdistan region of the country where he says he’s been invited by Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talebani, who are respectively the heads of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan and of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Senator de Montesquiou says that the objective of his week-long sojourn into the Kurd-dominated parts of the country is to obtain the reaction of the leaders of the 4-million strong Kurdish population to the possibility of a US-led strike against Iraq.