The United States army kept up a deadly battle against radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr as the US-British allies faced a grilling on Tuesday over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and foreigners came under renewed attack.
US forces said they killed 13 members of al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia in an overnight clash outside Kufa near the holy city of Najaf, as violence raged on less than two months before the planned handover of sovereignty to Iraqis.
Four people also died in a blast in the northern oil centre of Kirkuk, in a Kurdish area of the ethnically mixed city, while a 21-vehicle civilian convoy was attacked on the road from Jordan bringing supplies to the capital.
A coalition military official had no immediate details of casualties from this incident but two people were unaccounted for.
Also on the civilian front, Russia said one of its nationals working to restore Iraq’s energy supplies was killed and two others taken hostage when armed men attacked them as they drove back to Baghdad late on Monday.
Netherlands Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, meanwhile, reacted with ”horror” after the first soldier of the 1 260-strong Dutch contingent died in a grenade attack on Monday in the southern town of Samawa. Two people have been arrested.
The mandate of the Dutch contingent expires on June 30 and no decision has yet been made to renew it.
Japan said its efforts to help rebuild Iraq will not be affected by the attack in Samawa, where about 550 Japanese troops are also based.
”There is no particular change at the moment,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said.
Honduran President Ricardo Maduro, in an interview broadcast from Tokyo, said his country has begun its troop withdrawal from Iraq, as the first of its 369 soldiers arrived in Kuwait.
The Dominican Republic and Honduras decided to pull their troops out of Iraq last month, following Spain’s decision to withdraw.
They were attached to the 1 400-strong Spanish-led brigade in Najaf.
South Korea, meanwhile, said it has delayed the dispatch of troops to Iraq by at least a month, amid mounting opposition to the deployment triggered by the revelations of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US and British forces.
The Seoul government has said it will send 3 600 troops to Kurdish-held northern Iraq in about June.
”More discussions are needed before we send troops,” said a Defence Ministry spokesperson, Brigadier General Nam Dai-Yeon.
In the prisoner scandal, US Major General Antonio Taguba, who authored a report detailing ”sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses” by US soldiers inside Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail, was to appear on Tuesday before Congress.
Photographs seized by Tabuba’s team have found their way into the US media, drawing international shock. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has warned that more terrible photos exist that have yet to be released publicly.
The embattled defence chief himself withstood more than six hours of questioning last Friday as Senate and House lawmakers quizzed him.
US President George Bush said on Monday through his spokesperson that he was disgusted by the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but told Rumsfeld to his face he was a ”superb” government official.
Bush was shown a ”representative sample” on Monday of the hundreds of photographs of abuses by US soldiers that have not yet been seen by the public.
Britain’s government, like its US ally, tried desperately on Tuesday to contain the scandal, as Amnesty International accused British troops of killing Iraqi civilians who posed no immediate threat, including an eight-year-old girl.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Prime Minister Tony Blair denied having early knowledge of a confidential February report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on coalition maltreatment of Iraqi prisoners.
But he insisted that cases in the ICRC report dealing with British forces have been ”dealt with properly”.
In Parliament, British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said on Monday that 33 cases of Iraqi civilian deaths, injuries and mistreatment at the hands of British forces have either been investigated or are under investigation.
Despite the US and British assurances, Arab foreign ministers strongly denounced the ”inhuman practices” and demanded that those involved face trial, according to a draft resolution on Iraq obtained by AFP on Tuesday.
On the ground, pressure continued to mount on al-Sadr, who has become the focal point of armed Shiite resistance but is holed up inside Najaf where he is wanted over the murder of a rival cleric last year.
The new US-appointed governor of Najaf, Adnan al-Zorfi, said that if al-Sadr disbanded his Mehdi Army, legal proceedings over the murder could be halted until after the June 30 handover of sovereignty.
He also announced plans to appoint another 4 000 members of the paramilitary Iraqi Civil Defence Corps to impose control over the area.
Demonstrators fled in panic on Tuesday after Mehdi Army members fired into the air to break up a protest demanding that they leave their stronghold near the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, a revered site for Shiites.
Dozens of demonstrators, marching at the instigation of Iraq’s biggest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, had chanted ”leave Najaf to the residents of Najaf”.
On the economic front, interim Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum said Iraqi oil exports should return to normal in the next 24 hours following a sabotage attack on a vital pipeline in the south of the country.
”Exports were at a rate of 1,7-million barrels per day before [Sunday’s] sabotage,” the minister told a Baghdad news conference. ”We hope to return them to their pre-sabotage level in the next 24 hours.” — Sapa-AFP