The German government has been expecting the request and officials in Berlin suggested last week that the country would comply, despite strong opposition among the German public to its five-year-old military mission in Afghanistan.

According to NATO sources, the alliance is asking Germany to prepare a contingent of 250 troops who will be stationed at Mazar-i-Sharif, replacing the Norwegian force which will withdraw in the summer.

Germany has some 3,200 soldiers in Afghanistan as part of the 37-nation, NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

The overwhelming majority of the troops are stationed in the relatively calm north of Afghanistan and Berlin has resisted mounting pressure to deploy troops in the south to help its NATO partners fight a tenacious Taliban insurgency.

Government officials have in recent weeks denied that supplying a rapid reaction force would amount to sending men into combat.

They pointed out that the force was designed to provide emergency support to other troops in the north and that though its brief includes hunting "terrorists" and dealing with kidnappings this is not its main task.

Senior German defence official Thomas Kossendey said last week that Germany would not need a new, wider parliamentary mandate to deploy the rapid reaction force and that it would "remain in northern Afghanistan".

The current mandate limits the German force in Afghanistan to 3,500 soldiers.

Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung has said he expects to make a decision on the request by February 8.

Germany has faced strong criticism within NATO ranks for refusing to send troops to southern Afghanistan to help tackle the Taliban.

NATO is undertaking its most ambitious and potentially perilous mission ever in the country, where it is trying to spread the influence of President Hamid Karzai's government to more lawless regions well away from the capital Kabul.

But NATO commanders say they need some 7,500 extra troops to carry out their mission, even though the force the alliance leads there grew from around 33,000 in January 2007 to some 42,000 in December.

Since it first deployed in Afghanistan after the Taliban regime was ousted, 25 German soldiers, three police officers and four civilians have died there.

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