Vienna - As Mohamed ElBaradei is about to enter his last year as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he faces a lot of loose-ended issues such as Iran, Syria and North Korea.

But agency officials and experts hope that US president-elect Barack Obama and his new administration in Washington will help to tie some of them up.

In 2008, the IAEA made little progress in clarifying outstanding issues about Iran`s nuclear programme, was not able to expand its inspection role in North Korea, and was tasked with looking into a possible secret reactor project in Syria.

While ElBaradei is aware that all these issues cannot be closed by the time he leaves office on November 12 next year, one of his closest advisers said, he is optimistic about Obama's promise to deal with Iran and North Korea through direct talks.

"I think there is no other way to solve these critical policy issues like North Korea, or Iran, or Syria, that are somehow embedded into a political discussion", said Vilmos Cserveny, who heads the IAEA`'s office of external relations and policy coordination.

In Iran, the agency`s inspectors have been trying since 2003 to find out if the country`s leaders really did not engage in any work related to nuclear weapons, but in the past months, Iran has not responded to the their questions.

"As a technical organisation, we have reached our limits to contribute to this process," said Cserveny, a former Hungarian diplomat.

ElBaradei felt there was a need for a negotiated solution, he said, such as the economic incentives package offered to Iran by Britain, Germany, France, the US, Russia and China.

But if the 66-year-old Nobel prize winner is to see some progress before the end of his 12-year stint as director general of the IAEA, some movement by the leadership in Tehran is also needed.

"President Ahmadinejad represents the extremist wing of the Islamic Republic," said Harald Mueller, the executive director of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.

"I am afraid that there will only be some movement after he is voted out in the elections next year - and there are many signs that this might happen."

Like Iran, Syria is not fully cooperating with the IAEA. It has so far not clarified if a site destroyed by the Israeli air force in September 2007 was a secret nuclear reactor under construction, as the US claims.

"This, too, could draw out beyond ElBaradei's term," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a non-proliferation researcher at the IISS think tank in London.

While Fitzpatrick thinks the new US administration could make a positive impact in moving the investigation forward, Cserveny said what was really needed was for IAEA member states to make their satellite images available to inspectors, and for Syria to allow more agency visits.

ElBaradei wrote in report in November that features of the site were similar to that of a nuclear reactor, and that uranium particles were found there.

While the IAEA has been to inspect Iran and Syria in 2008, its role is much more limited in North Korea, where inspectors are only allowed to monitor the freeze of the country`s nuclear installations, which were used in its nuclear weapons programme.

Meanwhile, US experts are working with North Korean counterparts to dismantle these facilities in Yongbyon, under a 2005 agreement also involving China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.

ElBaradei wanted his experts to play a bigger role in the verification of North Korea.

But a diplomat who has frequent contacts with ElBaradei said the Egyptian director general realized that verification would end up being carried out by the six countries party to the deal, as North Korea refused to let a technical UN organisation with no political bargaining leeway do this work.

However, that meant that if the leaders in Pyongyang decided to join the IAEA again, the agency would have to its own full verification, he said.

So far, Japan`s UN ambassador in Vienna, Yukiya Amano, and South Africa`s representative at the IAEA governing board, Abdul Samad Minty, are the only two candidates to succeed ElBaradei.

"There will be enough work for the next director general," Cserveny said.