The US is shaping a fresh UN resolution to persuade more countries to provide peacekeeping troops in Iraq after gaps in security were exposed by the devastating attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad this week.
The moves came as a previously unknown Iraqi group claimed responsibility for the attack, an Arabic television channel said yesterday.
Dubai-based Al Arabiya said it received a statement claiming responsibility for the truck bomb attack, which killed 24, from an Iraqi Islamist group calling itself the "Armed Vanguards of the Second Mohammed Army".
"The statement promised to make war on all foreigners and do similar acts," the station, showing a picture of the statement in Arabic, said.
The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, said yesterday that officials were "exploring the language" of a new Security Council resolution that "might call on member states to do more".
The Pentagon hopes that a UN resolution might mollify countries reluctant to send forces without an international mandate. But Mr Powell also said the US would not cede control of security to a multinational force in Iraq.
Mr Powell, in New York for emergency meetings at the UN, said: "Additional language in a new resolution might encourage others. We're looking forward to language that might call on member states to do more. The president has always felt the UN has a vital role to play."
Mr Jack Straw, Britain's Foreign Secretary, is scheduled to meet the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, this morning and will discuss the proposals.
But some Security Council diplomats privately expressed concerns that the US was trying to take advantage of the anger that followed Tuesday's bombing.
Hundreds of soldiers and civilians, assisted by sniffer dogs, continued the search for bodies in the rubble of the Canal Hotel yesterday.
Mr David Roath from the US Defence Department, who is overseeing recovery efforts, said all evidence of human remains was being collected and would be sent to a lab for testing.
Mr Ramiro Lopez da Silva, UN humanitarian coordinator, said UN agencies would resume operations in Iraq on Saturday and there would be no full-scale evacuation of staff.
Mr da Silva said 86 people were seriously wounded in the attack. Many of them were being flown out of the country. An unknown number of victims were still buried in the rubble.
With a plaster taped to his forehead masking an injury suffered in the bombing, Mr da Silva said UN support and administrative staff, numbering about 100 out of a workforce of 300, were being flown to Amman in Jordan and Larnaca in Cyprus, from where they would continue to help implement operations in Iraq.
Asked whether security would be dramatically increased around UN buildings in Iraq in the future, Mr da Silva said: "We will always remain a soft target, that is the way we operate. We cannot create a divide between us and the people we serve."
Iraq has become increasingly chaotic with attacks shifting to soft targets, such as water supplies and oil pipelines.
UN diplomats will be watching the wording of any new resolution closely. The issue of control of the peacekeeping mission is a key stumbling block for many states reluctant to place troops under American command, including France, Russia and Turkey. India, which opposed the war, has suggested it could send a division of about 18,000 troops, but only under a UN resolution.
Following his meeting with Mr Annan, Mr Powell suggested foreign troops would appreciate working under the "solid, competent military leadership" of the US. "You have to have control of a large military organisation. That's what the US leadership brings to the coalition. The issue of ceding authority is not an issue we have had to discuss today."
He said the peacekeeping effort in Iraq was already an international coalition, with 30 countries providing 22,000 troops, half of them from Britain. He said another five countries were close to sending troops and talks were ongoing with a further 14. There are 139,000 US troops in Iraq.
Mr Annan said the UN would confine its role to economic and humanitarian services and would not be sending its own security forces, so called "blue helmets".