Al-Maliki extends deadline

BAGHDAD – Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Friday extended a deadline for militiamen battling government troops to disarm as fighters showed no signs of ending a standoff with Iraqi forces.

U.S. forces intervened in the battle in the southern city of Basra by strafing militia positions overnight with cannon fire from American warplanes, British authorities said.

Earlier, a British military spokesman in the city, Maj. Tom Holloway, said Iraq had requested airstrikes on the targets and that American jets happened to be in the vicinity and responded by dropping two bombs.

Holloway said the planes were part of 24-hour air support provided by the United States and Britain over Basra since Tuesday, when al-Maliki deployed troops to quell violence by Shiite Muslim militiamen.

U.S. authorities said a Navy fixed-wing aircraft conducted a strike on a mortar position in Basra, killing three “criminal militia members.”

Despite a curfew imposed across Baghdad, mortar and rocket attacks Friday continued to plague the Green Zone, the heavily fortified enclave in the capital that is home to the U.S. Embassy and most Iraqi government offices. One hit the office of Vice President Tariq Hashimi. He was not there, but police said three guards were killed.

Al-Maliki’s decision to extend what had been a three-day disarmament deadline, set to expire Saturday, until April 8 was a sign of the resistance he faces from militiamen loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

A spokesman for Iraq’s Interior Ministry, Maj. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf, said Friday that “no one handed over his weapons” after al-Maliki issued his first order Wednesday. But Khalaf said the ministry, which oversees police, had received calls from people asking how to turn in their arms without facing arrest or other repercussions.

As a result, Khalaf said, a formal disarmament system had been established that allows fighters to register at local mosques, instead of going to police stations.

“During this time the armed men should hand over the heavy and the medium weapons, and they will receive a financial award,” Khalaf said. He did not say what the financial award would be.

Iraq’s government has portrayed the operation so far as a success, but violence has erupted in Shiite strongholds across the country.

Al-Maliki says the offensive is aimed at crushing rogue elements of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia, which is locked in a power struggle in the south with the rival armed wing of the government-backed Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.

But al-Sadr denies that his men are involved in violence. His followers reject assertions by al-Maliki and the U.S. military that the current operation is targeting only rogue militiamen and say it is aimed at al-Sadr in hopes of sidelining his movement.

There were scattered reports of clashes Friday across Iraq.

Police said fighting in the provincial capital of Nasiriya had left 15 people dead since Thursday, seven of them civilians and the rest militiamen and police.

In Basra, which remained under curfew, gunmen killed the manager of one of the city’s hospitals Thursday.