Al-Sadr agrees to stop fighting
NAJAF, Iraq – Radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr accepted a peace plan Wednesday calling for his militiamen to disarm and leave their hideout in a revered Shiite shrine, raising hopes of ending a battle that has threatened to undermine Iraq’s fledgling interim government.
But gunfire and explosions crackled across Najaf after the deal was announced and there was no indication of whether there could be a quick end to two weeks of fighting between al-Sadr’s forces and U.S. soldiers and government troops in this holy city.
Al-Sadr has made contradictory statements in the past, and aides to the cleric said he still wanted to negotiate details of the peace deal.
In Washington, the Bush administration said al-Sadr needed 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 Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s national security adviser.
The cease-fire agreement was announced at the National Conference in Baghdad, which had sent a delegation to negotiate with al-Sadr.
The conference, a gathering of more than 1,000 prominent Iraqis that was seen as an important milestone on the country’s path to democracy, spilled into an unscheduled fourth day Wednesday so it could choose members of an interim National Council. The council is to act as a watchdog over the interim government until elections in January.
Disputes persisted at the conference throughout the day over how to choose 81 elected members of the council, with small parties complaining they were being strong-armed by the large factions into accepting their slate of candidates.
A planned vote to affirm a slate of 81 candidates was called off at the last minute, and the conference organizers simply affirmed the group – to the dismay of many of those who were not included in the council. The final 19 members of the 100-member council will be members of the former U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council who were left out of the interim government.
Al-Sadr’s loyalists and a combined U.S.-Iraqi force have been fighting for nearly two weeks throughout Najaf, battling in the vast graveyard and in the streets of its Old City. A wall surrounding the Imam Ali Shrine, where the militants have holed up, was reportedly chipped in the fighting, and any damage to the gold-domed mosque itself would infuriate the world’s 120 million Shiite Muslims.
The drawn-out fighting, which had spread to other Shiite areas, has already burnished al-Sadr’s reputation among poor, grass-roots Shiites at the expense of more senior – and more moderate – clerics and hampered the government’s efforts to quell a separate Sunni insurgency.
On Wednesday afternoon, Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan said the government could send Iraqi forces to raid the shrine by the end of the day. 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 would accept the gathering’s peace proposal, which demands his militia drop its arms, withdraw from the shrine and transform itself into a political party in exchange for amnesty.
Sheik Hassan al-Athari, an official at al-Sadr’s Baghdad office, said the cleric wanted to negotiate how the plan would be implemented and to ensure his militants would not be arrested. He said al-Sadr had other minor conditions, but did not elaborate.
Al-Sadr aide Ahmed al-Shaibany said U.S. forces must first stop attacking.
“They cannot ask us to disarm while … they’re using warplanes to fight us. There should be a cease-fire first and then they ask us to disarm,” he said.
The U.S. military says the clashes have killed hundreds of militants, though the militants deny that. Eight U.S. soldiers and at least 40 Iraqi police have been killed as well.
Eight people were killed and 27 wounded in fighting in Najaf on Wednesday, Hussein Hadi of Najaf General Hospital said.
Also Wednesday, one U.S. soldier was shot and killed during an attack on troops patrolling Baghdad, the military said. Two Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were also killed Wednesday, the military said. One Marine was killed while conducting “security and stability operations” in the volatile Anbar province, and the other died in a vehicle accident.
As of Tuesday, 943 U.S. service members had died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq in March 2003, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
Near Hillah, about 60 miles south of Baghdad, seven coalition soldiers were wounded during a mortar attack on their camp, the military said. They included two Polish soldiers and five civilians – one American, one Pole and three Iraqis.
At the Abu Ghraib prison, which was the center of a scandal over allegations that American prison guards abused Iraqi detainees, U.S. military police shot and killed two detainees and wounded five others during a massive brawl Wednesday, the military said.
Several detainees attacked an inmate with rocks and tent poles in a fight that soon encompassed 200 people, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, the U.S. military’s spokesman for detention operations in Iraq. The military decided to use lethal force because one detainee risked being killed by fellow inmates, he said. Abu Ghraib is west of Baghdad.
In the northern city of Mosul, a mortar round slammed into a busy market Wednesday, killing five civilians and wounding 21, the U.S. military said.