UNITED NATIONS -- The adoption by the United Nations Security Council next week of a resolution on Iraq would lead to preliminary weapons inspections by the end of the year, UN sources said Friday.

Intrusive inspections of sites suspected of manufacturing or stocking chemical or biological weapons or missiles to deliver them are unlikely to start for at least two months after that.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has said he expects the council to adopt a resolution late next week instructing the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) to resume inspections within 45 days, AFP reported.

UNMOVIC Chairman Hans Blix has said that he and the Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed el-Baradei, would lead an advance party of up to 20 people to Baghdad a week to 10 days after the council vote.

The IAEA is charged with verifying Iraq's claim that it has no nuclear weapons program.

The advance party would reopen offices used by the former arms inspectorate, which was withdrawn in 1998, and organize accommodation and transport for the new teams.

"Even if the computers were brand-new then, they are four years old now," a source said.

Blix told a television interviewer on Thursday that he would need a large number of jeeps, three heavy helicopters and five light helicopters.

Secure telephone lines will have to be installed between the offices and UNMOVIC's headquarters at the United Nations in New York, and laboratories will need to be upgraded.

Some equipment such as tires for the jeeps could be bought locally, but much of it will have to be flown into Iraq.

Two UNMOVIC officials were due in Cyprus this weekend to set up a staging post at Larnaca, close to the international airport on the south coast, where inspectors can group to receive instructions and UN identity cards before entering Iraq.

While his headquarters staff are full-time UN officials, most of the people on Blix's roster of 230 inspectors will have to take leave of absence from employers around the world and work on short-term contracts.

The first inspections will probably involve only about 12 people and will be confined to "rebaselining" or establishing what has changed in Iraq since the former inspection team (UNSCOM) pulled out.

At a meeting in Vienna on October 1, the Iraqi authorities gave Blix and el-Baradei a backlog of six-monthly reports on the state of industrial facilities which UNSCOM said could be used for military purposes.

The reports, on computer disks, are being analyzed in New York.

"They may say, for example, that a machine tool with UNSCOM tag number 12345 has been transferred from the state establishment for light engineering, where it was being used to produce bicycles, to the establishment for heavy engineering to manufacture truck parts," a source said.

Rebaselining can be done by small teams, he said, because "these are sites that Iraq has already declared. We will not go in expecting to find dozens of Scud missiles, so there will be no need to have a helicopter hovering overhead or people staking out the back doors," he added.

"Inspecting a lathe is different from searching for hidden missile parts," he said.

Once they start work, UNMOVIC and the IAEA have 60 days under existing resolutions to report back to the council with a program of work including "the key remaining disarmament tasks".

The program has to be approved by the council and "there could be some slippage because there is bound to be a row over what the key remaining tasks are," the source commented.