Islamic states will meet to discuss the Iraq crisis immediately after the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit next week, Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said today.

The current head of the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Qatar, had dropped its initial objections to the meeting, national news agency Bernama reported.

"Qatar has agreed and they are supportive of the informal discussions," the agency quoted Syed Hamid as saying.

He said Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Qatar's Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, current head of the OIC, discussed the meeting in a telephone conversation yesterday.

Qatar, a close ally of the United States and the nation that is likely to serve as the command center of any military campaign against Iraq, had initially been reluctant to sanction such a meeting.

Mahathir had publicly expressed his disappointment over Qatar's stand, saying the talks should be held to take advantage of the presence of OIC heads of state and government attending the NAM summit beginning Feb 20.

Some 50 of the 114 NAM member countries are also OIC nations.

Emergency summit

Syed Hamid made it clear, however, that the meeting of Islamic states o­n Feb 26, would be "informal" and could not produce any resolutions in the name of the OIC.

Instead, Qatar had sought Malaysia's support o­n the convening of an emergency OIC summit in Doha o­n a date to be decided later, he said.

The talks in Kuala Lumpur will also cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the possibility of a US-led attack o­n Iraq will dominate the discussions.

"It will be a pity if the war o­n Iraq takes place when the OIC has not even articulated its views," Syed Hamid said.

The NAM summit itself is shaping up as a major anti-Iraq-war platform for leaders of the movement, the largest grouping of states outside the United Nations.

Both the outgoing and incoming heads of the organisation - South Africa and Malaysia - are strong opponents of threats by the US to lead an invasion to disarm Iraq without the support of the UN Security Council.

South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is deeply involved in international efforts to prevent a conflict, hands over the chairmanship of NAM to Mahathir, a Muslim leader with an increasingly hard line against a war.

Most member states are developing countries without international clout of their own, but many are also key players in the US's war o­n terrorism - with NAM's roll-call stuffed with countries from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

NAM was formed as an alternative to the Western and Eastern blocs in the 1950s, and has been seen as increasingly irrelevant since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But with Iraq itself a member state, the crisis over its alleged weapons of mass destruction is seen as an opportunity to reverse the decline in the organisation's fortunes. AFP