KUWAIT. Oct 9: United Nations observers have stepped up armed patrols along the Kuwait-Iraq frontier on orders from the UN Security Council following an Iraqi troop build up in southern Iraq, a spokesman said today. * reports Reuter.

The border demilitarised zone, a strip 10km (six miles) wide on the Iraqi side and five km (three miles) wide on the Kuwaiti side, remains quiet, the spokesman for the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission (UNIKOM) added.

"The number of armed patrols has increased and we are keeping our vigilance.'1 a spokesman told Reuters by telephone from the border.

'Everything is quiet. The DMZ remains calm and we have no reports of any violations."

The United States says up to 64.000 Iraqi troops backed by hundreds of tanks have massed in southern Iraq and some of them have advanced towards the Kuwait-Iraq border.

The United Nations set up the demilitarised zone and deployed UNIKOM along ft in 1991 after a US-led alliance drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in the six-week Gulf War. Iraq had Invaded Kuyvait in 1990 and claimed the emi rate as its own.

UNIKOM is required to ensure that no military personnel or unauthorised armed people enter the zone. The only armed people allowed in the zone are Iraqi and Kwuaitl police. who may carry sidearms only, and UNIKOM personnel.

AFP from Dubai says, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on Saturday sent troops from its Joint force the peninsula shield to Kuwait to confront the threat posed by Iraq, diplomats in the Gulf said.

The units, based in Hafr Al-Batan in the northeast of Saudi Arabia left Saturday for Kuwait following a meeting of GCC army chiefs-of-staff in Riyadh.

The diplomats did not say how large a force had been sent, but the peninsula shield is mostly a symbolic force of several thousand men which proved ineffective when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

In a statement issued from its Riyadh headquarters, the GCC condemned a build-up of Iraqi troops near the border with Kuwait as an act of aggression. ’

It said they were "following with .deep concern the developments in the region in the light of the threat posed by a concentration by the Iraqi regime of its troops on the border. '

Meanwhile, the whole of northern Kuwait bordering Iraq was declared a military zone until further notice on Saturday by the Kuwaiti government. ■

The official agency Kuna quoting an Interior Ministry statement said it was 'forbidden to stay, circulate or approach this zone."

The statement came as the entire Kuwaiti army was ordered to deploy along the border to ward off any threat from Iraqi troops massed near the Emirate.