BAGHDAD, November 3 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - U.S. peace activists vowed here Sunday, November 3, they would stay in Baghdad even if their country declared war on Iraq.

"We will study Arabic, do volunteer work, keep on sending diaries back home about our interaction with the Iraqi people," Kathy Kelly, spokesperson of Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Kelly, from Chicago, said there were now 11 members of the group in Baghdad, and that at least 70 other volunteers were ready to come.

"We have requested visas for them," she said.

She dismissed the idea that they would provide Iraq with a U.S. human shield, pointing out that members of the group stayed in Baghdad during the December 1998 U.S.-British bombing blitz.

"We know that journalists are not regarded as human shields and they work very hard to send messages back to their countries.

"We want to do the same, we want to communicate the concerns of the people here to people in our country," said Kelly, 49, who remained in Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War, before Voices in the Wilderness was set up in 1996.

She was speaking at the end of a press conference held by the Iraq Peace Team, a 17-member delegation,15 Americans and two Canadians, comprising her group and Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT).

They are campaigning for an end to the 12-year U.N. embargo imposed to Iraq and against a U.S.-led strike.

The delegation is visiting Baghdad despite a U.S. official travel ban on Iraq that provides for penalties of up to 12 years imprisonment and a fine of more than one million dollars, said Kelly.

Members who spoke at the conference held in the 13th century Al-Mustansirya School, the most famous science university of its times, called on American families to mobilize to avert war.

"We urge grandfathers and grandmothers, fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, to come together and to think about the Iraqi children like we would think about our own children," said John Worrell, a 69 year-old retired archaeologist from Brimfield, Massachusetts.

"We came here because seeing is believing ... We have seen children suffering because of not having the basic things for education and healthcare.

"And we came to be seen as Americans who stand for the real principles of America.

"The real principles of America are not force and conquest, it's justice for all," he added.

Marian Solomon, a 72-year old member of CPT from Ames, Iowa, said: "I'm here to make sure my grandsons, or any one else, never have to go to war."

"The United States and its policy is creating a culture in the whole Middle East of children who do not know that there are loving people out there, who really care about them," said Anne Montgomery, a 76-year-old Catholic nun from New York.

CPT said in a press release it represents more than 3,000 churches across the United States and Canada, dedicated to non-violence.