US may shift air war HQ from Saudi base to Qatar

The nerve centre for US air operations in the Gulf region looks likely to be moved from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, in what may herald a rethink of America's military presence.

Responding to a report that General Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces in the Gulf, planned to move the centre, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, would only say the general was "thinking about that with his staff".

The general was reported to have said: "We're going to move it over there and going to start running some air ops out of it," referring to plans to switch from the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia to Qatar's al-Udeid base.

Riyadh allowed US forces to use its bases to control operations but refused to let US planes take off on strikes. The White House views the Saudi royal family as a guarantor of stability, and US troops in the country are seen as fuelling militant opposition to it.

The numbers of US troops would be reduced, Mr Rumsfeld said while visiting the Gulf.

"The forces that were necessary to liberate Iraq are not necessary for the stability period," he said, hinting they might fall below the peacetime 15,000. "Iraq was a threat in the region, and because the threat will be gone, we also will be able to rearrange our forces."

In an interview he gave to al-Jazeera, the Arabic channel, he said: "We have no plans for a long-term base in Iraq." But the US was not "pulling out" of Saudi Arabia. "We have a long-standing relationship we both value," he said.

· Iraq's former deputy premier, Tariq Aziz, has told US interrogators that Saddam Hussein survived the first US air strike, although Aziz did not know about the second one in April. He was also adamant Iraq had no biological, chemical and nuclear weapons because they had all been destroyed. A Pentagon official said it was still searching the sites of the two strikes for evidence of Saddam's death.