The United States remains interested in a greater German involvement in Iraq according to a newspaper report on Friday. According to the Berlin daily Berliner Zeitung, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has asked his German counterpart Franz Josef Jung for help in training the Iraqi military in Baghdad. Germany's policy of only providing training assistance outside the borders of Iraq, however, will continue, Jung said at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday.

"We're contributing our part to the stabilization of Iraq," Jung said while also emphasizing that German assistance outside Iraq would continue.

Germany has participated in training Iraqi officers in both Hamburg and in the United Arab Emirates as part of a NATO mission begun in 2004 aimed at stabilizing the situation in Iraq. Some 1,000 Iraqi officers have been trained in Baghdad since then with a further 500 travelling to Europe for training. But Germany has consistently refused to become involved directly in Iraq -- a policy that has not changed since Chancellor Angela Merkel's election in the autumn of 2005. Nevertheless, Merkel's term in office has corresponded with a thawing of trans-Atlantic relations which had become frosty under Merkel's predecessor Gerhard Schröder.

Despite the change of tone, however, a direct German involvement in Iraq would likely be extremely controversial. Schröder's outright refusal to get involved in Iraq, first voiced categorically during his 2002 campaign for the chancellery, was extraordinarily popular in Germany and led to his re-election that year. Four years later, the US presence in Iraq remains deeply unpopular in Germany.

The German military only recently pledged almost 800 troops to participate in a peace-keeping operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo during elections there at the end of July. German troops are likewise stationed in Afghanistan, Kosovo and off the Horn of Africa.