Cleric backs down as US Army lays siege
The US army laid siege to the holy Iraq city of Najaf today in a bid to capture a radical cleric leading an uprising against coalition forces.
The 2,500-strong 3rd Brigade Task Force, along with Spanish and Polish troops, set up an exclusion zone around Najaf to prepare for a possible assault to capture Muqtada al-Sadr.
An attack would outrage Iraq’s Shiite majority, a community that – apart from al-Sadr’s militia – has so far shunned anti-US violence.
Iraqi clerics and politicians launched negotiations with al-Sadr trying to get him to back down enough to avert an American attack.
There were indications tonight that he had dropped the conditions he imposed for opening negotiations with the Americans.
His envoy offered peace terms to spare Najaf a bloodbath.
Abdelkarim al-Anzi said the cleric had asked him to convey peace proposals to the Americans.
“Sayyed Moqtada made positive proposals to end the crisis. I cannot disclose the details. He realises that an armed confrontation is not in anybody’s interest,” he said in Baghdad.
The US army has branded al-Sadr an outlaw and pledged to kill or seize him.
Al-Sadr, who is wanted for the murder of a leading cleric in Najaf a year ago, had been staying near the Imam Ali shrine, sacred to the world’s Shiite Muslims, but an aide said he had now moved to his father’s house in the city.
Earlier he vowed to continue what he called “a popular revolution” to end the US occupation of Iraq.
“I fear only God. I am ready to sacrifice my blood for this country. But I call on the Iraqi people not to let my killing put an end to their rejection of the occupation,” he told Lebanese TV.
Al-Sadr pulled his militiamen out of police stations on Monday – a key US demand. But he passed through mediators a set of conditions to end the stand-off that suggested defiance.
They included ceasing all military operations, US withdrawal from all Iraqi cities and releasing all “innocent detainees.”
US commanders suggested they would give negotiations a chance.
“The target is not Najaf. The target is Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia,” said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy head of US military operations in Iraq.
“We will hunt him down and destroy him. We would prefer it not in Najaf or Karbala. We have very great respect for the shrines, for the Shiites.”
The siege of the Sunni city of Fallujah continued today with US warplanes and helicopter gunships firing heavy machine-guns, rockets and cannons attacking gunmen.
The truce in Fallujah was severely shaken by fighting today – though marines underlined their halt to offensive operations, called Friday, was still in effect.
“I don’t forecast that this stalemate will go on for long,” said marine commander Major General James Mattis. “It’s hard to have a ceasefire when they manoeuvre against us, they fire at us. We are trying to maintain the cease-fire, but the enemy is not maintaining the ceasefire.”
A Cobra attack helicopter fired rockets and heavy machine-guns at gunmen gathered on the northern edge of Fallujah. Rocket-propelled grenades arched up from the ground toward the helicopter and a second gunship providing support, but none apparently hit the gunships.
An A-130 gunship pounded a row of buildings from which Marines say ambushes have repeatedly been launched in a residential area of the city.
Gunmen repeatedly attacked one house in Fallujah that the marines were using.
“They came to play but we returned the serve quite well,” said Lieutenant Louis Langella.
Many – but not all – residents have fled neighbourhoods around the marine positions, the front lines of the exchanges. Marines have taken over abandoned houses and are using sledgehammers to bash through walls and move between houses without exposing themselves to fire from gunmen.
US troops were holding back their full firepower on both fronts to allow Iraqis to try to negotiate a resolution, but President George Bush said he was prepared to send more troops and has told his commanders to be ready to use ”decisive force.”
“Our work may become more difficult before it is finished,” Bush said.
“No one can predict all the hazards that lie ahead or the cost that they will bring. Yet, in this conflict, there is no safe alternative to resolute action.”
The US Defence Department plans to extend the combat tours in Iraq of more than 10,000 soldiers from a Germany-based armoured unit and a cavalry regiment from Louisiana, officials said today.
The move, which has not been officially announced, breaks a pledge given to all soldiers when they deployed to Iraq last year that they would be kept there no longer than 12 months.
Insurgents today offered the Iraqi equivalent of €6,000 to anyone who kills Mouwafak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, after he called for Fallujah’s residents to hand over militants to the United States.
“We announce a bounty of 10m Iraqi dinar for whoever brings the head of this pig,” the statement said.
With four more dead Marines reported, more US troops have been killed in April - a total of at least 87 – than in any month since the military set foot in Iraq.
US officials and the top American contractor in Iraq, Halliburton – once headed by US Vice President Dick Cheney – were trying to determine whether four mutilated bodies found belonged to seven Americans missing since gunmen attacked their convoy outside Baghdad on Friday.
One of the seven, Thomas Hamill, is known to have been kidnapped, and his captors threatened to kill him.
The Japanese government was tonight investigating a report that two Japanese journalists had been abducted in a Baghdad suburb today.
Three kidnapped Japanese civilians are already under sentence of death by their abductors.
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