Al-Sadr offers to remove fighters from Najaf

Radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has agreed to withdraw his militia from Najaf and hand the city back to Iraqi police, the government said, raising hopes for an end to weeks of fighting with coalition forces.

The announcement by National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie took place after US troops arrested al-Sadr’s key lieutenant in a pre-dawn raid. Clashes late Tuesday and early yesterday between US troops and militia fighters killed 24 people and wounded nearly 50, hospital and militia officials said.

There was no confirmation by al-Sadr. However, an agreement to abandon Najaf would be a major step toward ending his uprising in the south only weeks before a new Iraqi government takes power on June 30.

The weeks of fighting – which had threatened some of Shia Islam’s holiest sites – had posed a major challenge to the US occupation.

Also yesterday, three Marines were killed in Anbar province “while conducting security and stability operations”, the military said, declining to release further details because of security concerns. The province includes the western suburbs of Baghdad as well as Fallujah, Ramadi and Qaim.

Al-Rubaie, a Shiite and former Governing Council member, said al-Sadr made the offer in a letter to the city’s Shiite clerical hierarchy. According to al-Rubaie, al-Sadr offered to remove his fighters from Najaf – except for those who live there – but demanded that US and other coalition troops “return to base”, allowing Iraqi police to regain control of the city.

The young Shiite radical also demanded “broad discussions” within the Shiite community over the future of his al-Mahdi Army militia and that legal proceedings against him in a murder case be deferred until then.

Al-Sadr said he is making this offer because of “the tragic condition” in Najaf after weeks of fighting between his militiamen and the US and the slight damage suffered by the city’s holiest shrine, the Imam Ali mosque.

Fighting around some of the holiest cities of Shia Islam has angered many Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere and has led to calls for both the US and the militiamen to pull back from the shrines.

On Tuesday, the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf received slight damage. Both US and Shiite forces blamed the other.

US forces seized al-Sadr’s key lieutenant, Riyadh al-Nouri, during a raid on his Najaf home at around 4am local time yesterday. US officials said al-Nouri offered no resistance.

Al-Nouri’s arrest was a major blow to the al-Mahdi Army, which has been fighting coalition forces since early April in Shiite neighbourhoods of Baghdad and in the Shiite heartland south of the capital.

Al-Sadr launched his uprising after the US-led occupation authority launched a crackdown on his movement. An Iraqi judge has issued an arrest warrant charging both al-Sadr and al-Nouri in the April 2003 assassination of a moderate cleric, Abdul Majid al-Khoei.

US officials have expressed their desire for a peaceful settlement to the stand-off but have insisted that al-Sadr disband his “illegal militia” and submit to “justice before an Iraqi court”.

With signs of hope on the security front, steps toward organising a new government hit a snag yesterday when a leading candidate for prime minister, Dr Hussain al-Shahristani, took himself out of the running.

UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, tasked with choosing members of the new government, said in a statement released by his spokesman in New York that al-Shahristani “himself clarified that he would prefer to serve his country in other ways”.

Al-Shahristani, a Canadian and British-educated nuclear scientist, spent years in Abu Ghraib prison after he says he refused to work on nuclear weapons. He escaped during the 1991 Gulf War and made his way to Jordan.

Meanwhile, efforts to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure were dealt a blow yesterday when masked gunmen killed two technicians from a Russian energy firm as they headed to work at a power station. Their company said it would evacuate all staff from Iraq.

The attack on employees of Russia’s Interenergoservis company was the third on Russian workers in Iraq since last month. The latest ambush occurred as the company bus was approaching the Dora power station in south-western Baghdad. At least five people were wounded.

The Russian Foreign Ministry blamed the deteriorating situation on the failure of the occupation authority “to guarantee the necessary security”.

Elsewhere, three Iraqis were killed and nine were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded yesterday in south-west Baghdad, the US command said. Two of those killed and one of the wounded were believed to have been trying to set the bomb, the command said without elaborating.

In Baqouba, around 30 miles north-east of Baghdad, five people were killed and seven others wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near a convoy that included the city’s police chief, who escaped injury.