As delegates from inside and outside Iraq met on Monday to discuss the country's future, US soldiers fired on Iraqis at an anti-American demonstration after being shot at with automatic rifles by some in the crowd, a US officer said yesterday.
The director of the local hospital said 13 people were killed and 75 injured.
The shooting took place about 10:30pm Monday in the town of Fallujah, 50km west of Baghdad. The predominantly Sunni Muslim area provided strong support for former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.
Colonel Arnold Bray of the 82nd Airborne Division, who gave the US account of the clash, said at least seven Iraqis were hit by gunfire but could not confirm the reported deaths.
Ahmed Ghanim al-Ali, director of Fallujah General Hospital, said there were 13 dead, including three boys under 11 years old. He said his medical crews were shot at when they went to retrieve the injured, which he said numbered 75 people.
Local Iraqis said the anti-US demonstration was conducted by students between the ages of five and 20 to get the soldiers to leave a school were they were staying so classes could resume yesterday.
US troops in the town are headquartered in the school, and some in the crowd fired on the schoolhouse, Bray said. The Al-Jazeera television station, quoting local residents, said the US troops opened fire after someone threw a rock at the school.
Bray said there were infiltrators in the crowd, including some who were armed and on nearby rooftops.
"Which kind of schoolboys carry AK-47s?" Bray said.
The shooting contrasted with progress made at the summit, where delegates agreed to hold a nation-building meeting next month and fashion a temporary, post-Saddam government that the US predicted could be in place within days after that.
Iraq's American administrators, charting the future of the land they invaded, secured the pledge to meet again in May with an assortment of Iraqi delegates.
``I think we have enough ... to come up with a road map,'' said US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, adding that an administration could be in place within weeks.
Monday's daylong conference coincided with a date that had been a national holiday: It was Saddam's 66th birthday.
``Today, on the birthday of Saddam Hussein, let us start the democratic process for the children of Iraq,'' the US civil administrator for Iraq, retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner, told delegates.
The conference brought together Shiite and Sunni Muslim clerics in robes, Kurds from the north, tribal chiefs in Arab headdresses and Westernized exiles in expensive suits.
Still, some said Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population, were underrepresented, and delegates generally agreed on a need for wider representation in the future.
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