US forces tightened their grip around one of Iraq's holiest cities yesterday, and the rebel Shiite cleric they have vowed to kill or capture offered peace terms to spare Najaf a bloodbath.
An envoy appointed by Moqtada al-Sadr said the wanted cleric had asked him to convey peace proposals to the Americans.
The 2,500-strong Third Brigade Task Force, along with Spanish and Polish troops, set up what US officers called an exclusion zone around Najaf and sent out reconnaissance patrols from Forward Operating Base Duke, 20km west of the city.
PHOTO: EPA
The Najaf buildup was proceeding hours after US President George W. Bush vowed to stay the course in Iraq and said a June 30 handover to Iraqi sovereignty would go ahead.
"Sayyed Moqtada made positive proposals to end the crisis. I cannot disclose the details. He realizes that an armed confrontation is not in anybody's interest," Sadr's envoy, Abdelkarim al-Anzi, now in Baghdad, said by telephone.
Anzi said he had met Sadr in Najaf on Tuesday.
The US military has branded Sadr an outlaw and pledged to kill or capture the cleric, who has taken refuge near Najaf's Imam Ali shrine, sacred to the world's Shiite Muslims.
As tension mounted in Najaf, Iraqi mediators said they had extended a shaky truce in the embattled Sunni town of Fallujah for 48 hours from 9am yesterday.
But violence flared in Baghdad, where US soldiers fired on looters raiding a military truck previously ambushed on the airport road. A photographer said he saw several Iraqis lying motionless and bleeding after the shooting.
Four people were killed and six wounded in the northern city of Mosul when a Katyusha rocket, aimed at a police station, hit a civilian area, police and hospital officials said.
Tension was also running high in Najaf's sister city of Kerbala, where residents said streets were empty amid fears of clashes between Sadr's militia and US-led forces.
Bulgaria said its troops in the shrine city had come under fire during the night. They took no casualties in the attacks on a patrol and on their base, the Defence Ministry in Sofia said.
Bush said his generals, who have asked for two more brigades -- about 10,000 troops -- to be sent to Iraq, would get them.
The revolt, which took US officials by surprise, came as insurgents from the smaller Sunni Muslim community, to which former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein belongs, responded to a military crackdown in central Iraq by taking on US Marines in street battles.
Hundreds of Iraqis have been killed this monht, already the deadliest month for the US military since Saddam's fall a year ago, with 83 Americans killed in two weeks of combat.
US Marines fought Sunni insurgents in Fallujah overnight and witnesses said four civilians and two fighters were killed, but negotiators extended a truce for 48 hours.
Hospitals would be resupplied, amenities would be repaired and civilians who fled the fighting could return.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS