Iraqis ready to control some cities

Iraqi troops are ready to take control of some cities as a first step toward sending home American and other foreign soldiers, Iraq’s prime minister said. But he rejected any timetable for a pull-out.

Underscoring the ongoing security crisis, gunmen killed four Iraqi human rights activists yesterday in Baghdad, a car bomb killed at least three people in the northern city of Kirkuk, and a US soldier died of wounds suffered in a land mine explosion.

This morning, gunmen killed an Iraqi soldier while he was driving his car in western Baghdad, police said.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari warned against setting a timetable for foreign troops to leave “at a time when we are not ready” to confront the insurgents.

But he said security in many of Iraq’s 18 provinces – notably in the Shiite south and the Kurdish-controlled north – has improved so that Iraqi forces could assume the burden of maintaining order in cities there.

“We can begin with the process of withdrawing multi-national forces from these cities to outside the city as a first step that encourages setting a timetable for the withdrawal process,” al-Jaafari said at a news conference with US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick.

“We don’t want to be surprised by a decision to withdraw at a time when we are not ready,” he said.

Al-Jaafari’s comments were aimed partly at defusing growing calls by Sunni Arabs and others for the Americans to set a date to leave Iraq. The prime minister, a Shiite, told parliament yesterday that he wants any withdrawal plan to be “an Iraqi decision with an Iraqi timetable – not with a terror timetable”.

He did not specify which cities could be turned over to the Iraqis. The insurgency is focused in Baghdad and the Sunni Arab heartland of central and northern Iraq. Wide areas of the Shiite south and Kurdish north are relatively peaceful.

Most of the 135,000 American troops are based in insurgent-infested areas deemed too dangerous to hand over to the Iraqis soon.

Zoellick said Washington was committed to supporting the new Iraqi leadership and that US troop strength “will be based on the conditions by which the Iraqi forces are able to meet the effort to deal with the counterinsurgency”.

However, the Defence Department wants to pull some troops out of Iraq next year, partly because the commitment is stretching the Army and Marine Corps perilously thin as casualties mount. US commanders believe the presence of a large US force is generating tacit support for anti-American violence.

Zoellick’s visit came one day after he signed four economic agreements with Iraqi officials in neighbouring Jordan. He travelled later to Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, to watch coalition soldiers train Iraqi police and to discuss reconstruction plans with local officials.

Coalition forces in Baghdad have captured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s top lieutenant in Baghdad, Abu Abd al-Aziz, Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday.

Myers said Abu Abd al-Aziz, also known as the Emir of Baghdad, was captured on Monday. The US Central Command in February described a man with the same name as a foreign terrorist cell leader in Iraq and said a reward was offered his capture. Al-Aziz’s age and nationality were not given.

The attack on the office of the International Organisation for Human Rights occurred in the same neighbourhood where Egypt’s top diplomat to Iraq, Ihab al-Sherif, was kidnapped this month by al Qaida in Iraq. The group said in an internet posting that it killed al-Sherif several days later.

Gunmen entered the office and opened fire, wounding one, according to a member of the organisation, Jamal Ibrahim. Most foreign human rights and aid workers have fled Iraq due to kidnappings and killings, many of them claimed by al-Qaida.

The car bomb in Kirkuk exploded in an industrial district as pedestrians were passing by. Police then came under fire and three were wounded, one critically, police Col. Ahmed Hamawandi said.

Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, is located in one of the richest oil fields in the Middle East and is home to Arab, Kurdish and Turkomen communities, each vying for power.

The American soldier died after his vehicle struck a land mine on Monday south of the capital, the US military said. Three other soldiers were wounded.