BAGHDAD-- Six U.S. activists staged a one-day hunger strike outside the UN offices in Baghdad on Tuesday to protest the crippling sanctions imposed on Iraq exactly 12 years ago.

The four men and two women from the U.S.-based group "Voices in the Wilderness" arrived in Iraq on July 30 and have been living in a small tent opposite the UN headquarters in Baghdad.

They were protesting "a policy of sanctions spearheaded by the United States and ramped through the United Nations that has been spectacularly unsuccessful," said activist Ramzi Kysia.

"The war on terrorism cannot be fought by being terrorists ourselves. Thousands of Americans were killed on September 11. that was an atrocity.

"Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been killed in Iraq by the United States and the United Nations over the last 12 years, and that is also an atrocity," Kysia said.

He said U.S. President George W. Bush was "pushing the entire world into war.

Bush has said he will use all tools at his disposal to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein, whom Washington accuses of developing weapons of mass destruction.

On August 6, 1990, four days after Iraq's lightning invasion of Kuwait, the UN Security Council imposed the toughest economic, financial and military sanctions in the history of the world body.

Iraq argues that a UN oil-for-food program -- launched in 1996 to allow Baghdad to export oil in exchange for food and other essentials such as medicine -- does not meet the 22-million population's most basic needs.

"Voices in the Wilderness", based in Chicago, Illinois and funded by donations, has made tens of solidarity trips to Iraq.