Peace team urges Sadr to call off uprising: Militia positions pounded
NAJAF, Aug 17: An Iraqi peace delegation urged Shia leader Moqtada Sadr on Tuesday to call off his uprising in Najaf, and on the battlefront US troops pounded militia positions near the country's holiest sites.
Braving US bombardment and militia sniper fire, the group of eight political and religious leaders drove to the office of Moqtada al Sadr, not far from the Imam Ali Mosque where the firebrand and his Mehdi Army are holed up.
They met Moqtada Sadr's top aides and then waited at the shrine for a meeting with him as fighting raged in a nearby ancient cemetery. The delegation flew in on US Black Hawk helicopters from a meeting in Baghdad where 1,300 delegates sought to select an interim national assembly to oversee the government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
Heated debates over Najaf and selecting members to the assembly have dominated the unprecedented gathering in Baghdad, a step on Iraq's tortured road to democracy. The conference, scheduled to end on Tuesday, was extended to Wednesday after many delegates opposed a list of 81 candidates presented to the meeting by the pro-US interim government, conference chairman Fouad Massoum said.
The remaining 19 members will come from the Governing Council, a 25-member body appointed by the US-led occupation before the June hand over of power. "If we stay here longer you will not be able to go home," Mr Massoum said, referring to the shaky security situation.
Once appointed, a 100-member national council will oversee the interim government until January elections. It will be able to veto legislation with a two-thirds majority, approve the budget and appoint a new prime minister or president should either quit or die in office.
Mr Allawi needs to quell the uprising that has hit eight central and southern cities and undermined his authority just seven weeks after he took over from US-led occupiers.
But he is walking a dangerous tightrope, with passions among Shias at boiling point over US troops fighting near holy sites in Najaf. In Baghdad, guerillas fired a shell into a busy street, killing at least seven people including two children. The attack wounded 42 people, leaving pools of blood on sidewalks.
In Basra, British troops battled Shia militiamen as darkness fell and at least one militiaman was killed. A spokesman in London said there were two British casualties but refused to say if they were killed or wounded.
Leaders at the national conference on Monday agreed to send the team to Najaf after Moqtada Sadr's weekend peace talks with the government collapsed and he vowed to fight to the death.
"This is a friendly mission to convey the message of the national conference," delegation head Sheikh Hussein al Sadr, a relative but political opponent of Sadr, told reporters at a US military camp on the outskirts of Najaf.
They then drove to Sadr's office with a police escort. "We want to change the Mehdi Army into a political organization and to evacuate the Imam Ali shrine with the promise not to legally pursue those taking shelter there. This is what the government and all Iraqis want."
The delegation earlier put off travelling by road to the southern city after guerillas threatened to ambush them. Aides to Moqtada Sadr have said he welcomed the idea of sending the team but have not said whether he would meet the mission.
ARTILLERY BARRAGE: As the delegation waited at the camp to be driven in civilian cars to the shrine, US troops fired some 20 artillery rounds at militia positions in the city.
US warplanes dropped flares while tanks and armoured vehicles fired repeated rounds at guerillas in the city centre. The militia responded with rocket-propelled grenades.
A Reuters photographer was wounded in the leg while covering the fighting. The photographer, an Iraqi, was treated for bullet fragment wounds at a US combat hospital and later released.
Broadening their uprising, the Mehdi Army set an oil well on fire in southern Iraq on Monday. The unrest forced Iraq to keep a main southern oil pipeline shut on Tuesday, reducing export flows by almost half.
Clashes also erupted overnight between the militia and US forces in Baghdad's Sadr City. The US military said one of its soldiers was killed and several others were wounded in clashes in the suburb.
The health ministry said 14 people had been killed and 122 wounded in Sadr City in the past 24 hours. Witnesses said two teenage girls were among the dead, killed in US shelling of the slum district where Sadr draws much of his support. -Reuters
