An Iraqi Cabinet minister said on Thursday that Iraqi forces could begin an offensive against Moqtada al-Sadr within hours, despite the firebrand cleric’s acceptance of a peace proposal.
To prevent an imminent attack on his forces, which are holed up in the revered Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, al-Sadr must immediately disarm his Mehdi Army militia and hand over its weapons to the authorities, Minister of State Qassim Dawoud said.
The cleric must also sign a statement saying he will refrain from future violence and release all civilians and members of Iraqi security forces his militants have kidnapped. In addition, al-Sadr must hold a news conference to announce he is disbanding the Mehdi Army.
”The military action has become imminent,” Dawoud told reporters. ”If these conditions are not met, then the military solution will prevail.”
Call for talks to stop ‘bloodbaths’
After hearing Dawoud’s threat, Sheik Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, a spokesperson for al-Sadr in Baghdad, called for talks to ”stop the bloodbaths in the holy city of Najaf”.
”What we want is for the parties to sit down and cooperate. To ask a side, or the Sadrist movement, to disarm, I think is not logical and not right. They should rather sit around a negotiating table and determine what’s right and wrong,” he told Al-Arabiya television.
Explosions and gunfire could be heard on Thursday in the streets of Najaf, where al-Sadr’s militants have been fighting a combined United States-Iraqi force for two weeks. Three US tanks and two Humvees were parked about 400m from the shrine, about as close as US forces have come to the holy site during the fighting.
Fighters from the Mehdi Army militia could be seen manning positions in narrow alleys of the Old City and outside the shrine compound. A clock on the compound’s outer wall, reportedly hit by shrapnel, was smouldering.
Fearful of the violence, few civilians ventured out and most stores, some damaged during the fighting, were closed.
Al-Sadr has conditions
Late on Wednesday, al-Sadr sent a letter to Iraq’s national conference gathering saying he will accept its peace plan to put down his arms, withdraw from the shrine and turn to politics in exchange for amnesty for his fighters.
However, he wants an end to the fighting before he complies and he wants to negotiate how the plan will be implemented, his aides said.
The government on Thursday demanded he comply without any conditions, and Dawoud said he has already toured Najaf’s hospitals to ensure they are properly supplied to handle the casualties expected from a final offensive.
”We will take the military action to … end this abnormal phenomenon so that this phenomenon would be a lesson for all the outlaws” in Iraq, Dawoud told Al-Arabiya.
He also demanded al-Sadr disband several Mehdi Army courts he has set up to mete out punishments, including the death penalty and amputations.
In Washington, the administration of President George Bush said al-Sadr needs to match words with deeds.
”We have seen many, many times al-Sadr assume or say he is going to accept certain terms and then it turns out not to be the case,” said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
National Conference ends
The ceasefire agreement was announced at the National Conference in Baghdad, which had sent a delegation to negotiate with al-Sadr.
The four-day conference, a gathering of more than 1 000 prominent Iraqis, was seen as an important milestone on the country’s path to democracy.
It ended on Wednesday with the selection of 81 members of a new National Council. The remaining 19 members will be drawn from members of the former US-appointed Iraqi governing council who were left out of the interim government.
The council, to sit next month, is supposed to act as a watchdog over the interim government until January elections.
Group vows to kill journalist
As clashes in Najaf continued, Arab television station Al-Jazeera aired a video on Thursday showing a militant group that calls itself the Martyrs Brigade vowing to kill a missing Western journalist if US forces do not leave Najaf within 48 hours. The authenticity of the tape could not be determined.
The video shows a man resembling missing journalist Micah Garen kneeling in front of five masked militants, who are armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Garen’s father and his fiancée were unavailable for comment.
According to witnesses, Garen and his Iraqi translator, Amir Doushi, were walking through a market in the southern city of Nasiriyah on Friday when they were seized by two armed men, police said. At the time of his abduction, Garen (36) was working on a story about the looting of archaeological sites in Iraq, said his fiancée, Marie-Helene Carleton.
The stand-off in Najaf has increasingly infuriated the government and on Wednesday afternoon Iraqi Defence Minister Hazem Shaalan said he could send Iraqi forces to raid the shrine within hours. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi issued a statement accusing the militants of mining the area around the shrine.
Hours later, al-Sadr’s office sent a message to the conference, saying he will accept the gathering’s peace proposal.
The US military says the clashes have killed hundreds of militants, though the militants deny that. Nine US troops and at least 40 Iraqi police have been killed as well.
Violence in Baghdad
Clashes have also spread to Baghdad.
On Thursday, an army spokesperson said one soldier died when attackers fired on a US patrol on Wednesday in the east Baghdad neighbourhood of Sadr City. The area has been the scene of ongoing firefights between US forces and al-Sadr’s supporters, said Major Philip Smith.
Another soldier was killed while patrolling the same area hours earlier, Smith said.
Two marines assigned to the First Marine Expeditionary Force were also killed on Wednesday, the military said on Thursday. One marine was killed while conducting ”security and stability operations” in Najaf, and the other died in a vehicle accident in Anbar province, west of Baghdad.
By Wednesday, 946 US service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq in March 2003, according to the US Defence Department.
In the central city of Hillah, two Polish troops were killed and five were injured early on Thursday in a car crash that followed an ambush by insurgents, said Colonel Zdzislaw Gnatowski, spokesperson for the Polish army chief of staff.
Early on Thursday, unidentified attackers killed an Iraqi security officer working for the state-run Northern Oil Company, police said.
Two other security officers were injured in the attack 10km from the northern city of Kirkuk, police Colonel Sarhat Qadir said.
At the Abu Ghraib prison, which was the centre of a scandal over allegations that American prison guards abused Iraqi detainees, US military police shot and killed two of the detainees and wounded five others during a massive brawl on Wednesday, the military said.
Several detainees attacked an inmate with rocks and tent poles in a fight that soon encompassed 200 people, said Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, the US military’s spokesperson for detention operations in Iraq. Abu Ghraib is situated west of Baghdad. — Sapa-AP
Mortar rounds hit police station