Cairo, Egypt ? U.N. nuclear safeguards inspectors will return to Iraq in the coming days after an official invitation from the new government, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Tuesday.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters in Cairo that Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari had formally asked his agency to return.

The safeguards inspectors, who will continue their work to ensure that Iraq adheres with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, will depart as soon as safety arrangements have been made, agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said from the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

ElBaradei estimated that they would depart in the next few days.

The inspectors would go to the Tuwaitha facility outside Baghdad, where they will “do an inventory verification on the nuclear material remaining in Iraq,” Fleming added.

The IAEA is responsible for dismantling Iraq’s nuclear program.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher stressed that the new inspection was unrelated to the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which was looking for evidence of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles to deliver them before the war started last year.

U.N. nuclear, chemical and biological weapons inspectors returned to Iraq in November 2002, as the United States was building up its forces in the region. In some 700 inspections before they left ahead of the U.S.-led war in March 2003, the inspectors reported finding no evidence of revived weapons programs.

After the war, the United States barred all U.N. inspectors from returning, instead deploying its own inspection teams to search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

“The return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq is an urgent necessity; not to search for weapons of mass destruction but to write the final report about the nonexistence of (such) weapons … in Iraq, which will enable the lifting of sanctions,” ElBaradei said in Cairo.

ElBaradei said the coalition forces had no mandate to prove or negate that Iraq had WMD.