SULAIMANIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - An Iraqi girl who died on Jan. 17 in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, had bird flu, Iraq's health minister said on Monday, despite the World Health Organization (WHO) having initially ruled out the virus. 

The WHO said it was asking for further tests to be carried out in a laboratory in Britain and was sending a mission to Iraq to assess the situation. 

"The test of Tijan's blood emphasized that she had bird flu from the kind that kills humans," Iraqi Health Minister Abdul Muttalib Mohammed Ali told a news briefing in Sulaimaniya, referring to 14-year-old Tijan Abdel-Qader. 

The WHO said on Jan. 19 that the teenager, who died two days earlier, did not have bird flu. A WHO spokeswoman said at the weekend the statement had been based on tests carried out only in Iraq. 

Iraqi officials have warned that rebel violence and anarchy that have impoverished Iraq, leaving its frontiers porous and sanitary regulations unenforceable, would make it very difficult for Baghdad to control any epidemic among wildfowl and poultry. 

Bird flu is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia and can infect people who come into close contact with infected birds. It has killed at least 83 people since late 2003 and recently spread to Iraq's neighbor  Turkey  where  local   officials

blame it for the death of four children.

Scientists say the H5N1 virus is mutating steadily and may eventually acquire the changes it needs to be easily transmitted from human to human. Because people lack any immunity to it, it could sweep the world in weeks or months, killing millions. 

POULTRY CULL  Iraqi Health Ministry spokesman Qasim Yahya Allawi told Reuters the ministry had received the positive test results, from a U.S. military facility in Cairo, on Sunday night. 

The health minister of Iraq's largely Kurdish region, Mohammed Khashnow, told the news briefing that teams were being formed to destroy all poultry in Sulaimaniya. "We ask for people's cooperation," he said. 

Zuhair Halaj, head of communicable diseases at the WHO office in Cairo, said the U.S. military laboratory had "done the preliminary test and it was H5N1 ... the next stage is another test which isolates the virus". 

"In Iraq the authorities will move as if it is confirmed ... A mission from the WHO will travel to Iraq to assess the situation." 

WHO officials said Iraq needed to step up surveillance, because the human cases, if confirmed, had emerged without any previous warning that the virus was present in poultry. 

COMPLEX TESTS  "It was ruled out before because all the indications at the time were that it was not bird flu ... Tests done in a laboratory in Baghdad had come back negative," WHO spokeswoman Maria Cheng in Geneva said, explaining why the WHO first declared the dead teenager did not have the virus. 

But she said testing for bird flu was complex and it would not be the first time that first diagnoses had been revised. 

The WHO said on Saturday it was also carrying out tests on the girl's uncle, who died last Friday. Sulaimaniya is close to Iraq's border with Turkey, where more than 20 people have been confirmed as having the H5N1 virus. 

"We are always concerned when we see more human cases (but)...at the moment it looks like two isolated cases," -- assuming that the uncle comes back positive as well, Cheng said. 

(Additional reporting by Richard Waddington in Geneva and Amil Khan in Cairo)