US presses insurgents to disarm

US Marines from the first battalion, 5th Marines, Bravo company, secure a temporary base in the center of the Iraqi city of Fallujah on Thursday. PHOTO: AFP

US forces gave insurgents in besieged Fallujah only days to surrender their weapons, while protesters marched through Basra blaming British occupiers for suicide bombings that killed 68 people.

Three hostages, two Swiss and an Israeli Arab, were freed Thursday, a day after a Dane was confirmed as the second hostage murdered in the series of abductions to hit Iraq.

A South African security guard was shot dead in Baghdad, while tension remained high in both the Shiite south and Sunni Muslim strongholds where fallen Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein drew much of his support.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Iraq was going through a "difficult patch" but that the US remained committed to a June 30 deadline for handing over power to Iraqis despite the violence.

"Changes always create uncertainty and we're just in that difficult period," Rumsfeld told a gathering of newspaper editors.

"The good Lord willing, we'll find a way through this difficult patch and end up with a government who will put the responsibility for the country back in the hands of the Iraqi people," he said. "It'll be an Iraqi solution."

"The good Lord willing, we'll find a way through this difficult patch and end up with a government who will put the responsibility for the country back in the hands of the Iraqi people. It'll be an Iraqi solution."

Donald Rumsfeld, US defense secretary

As Basra residents mourned their dead, the US-led coalition blamed Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network for Wednesday's coordinated bombings, whose victims included 20 schoolchildren.

"It looks like al-Qaeda," said a senior coalition official. "It's got all the hallmarks: it was suicidal, it was spectacular and it was symbolic."

But angry supporters of firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, credited with fueling a deadly rebellion against the occupation this month, marched through Basra blaming the suicide attacks on the British troops who control southern Iraq.

A spokesman for the cleric, wanted by the US forces for murder, said he had evidence British troops were involved in the bombings of police installations in and around Basra.

Captain Hisham Hallawi, a spokesman for the British forces, told CNN the accusation was "completely untrue."

US troops were also battling to ease tensions in Fallujah west of Baghdad, where fighting on Wednesday between US Marines and insurgents killed 36 Iraqis, according to US figures.

A US general warned the rebels they had "days not weeks" to turn in their weapons, dismissing arms already surrendered as a load of "junk."

Lieutenant General James Conway said he believed around 200 hardcore foreign fighters remained in Fallujah and accused them of stoking tensions in the Sunni Muslim bastion.

Since the Americans laid siege to Fallujah three weeks ago, fighting has killed more than 600 Iraqis, according to hospital sources, along with scores of Marines.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said Britain had no plans to send more troops to Iraq to add to the 8,000 already serving alongside 135,000 US soldiers, as France and Poland called for a greater UN role in the war-torn country.

But the outgoing British special representative to Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock told the BBC that peace would have been easier to restore if more coalition troops had been sent to the country.

"The analysis of what was going to happen after the conflict was not accurate, and the analyses that were accurate were not used," Greenstock said.

"You remember the American generals who said you are going to need hundreds of thousands of troops. Looking back, they would have been quite useful to deal with those lacunae," he said.

US General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that Washington may have to dispatch more troops to counter the growing unrest, less than 10 weeks before the handover of power.

The escalating violence in Iraq was taking its toll on the reconstruction calendar.

Industrial giant General Electric (GE) said it was being forced to delay some reconstruction projects because of the need to protect its personnel in Iraq.

"There has been some delay on projects we were working on because of security concerns," GE spokesman Gary Sheffer said, adding the company's "primary concern is the safety of our people."

He said the US-led coalition authority had issued some advice to people working in Iraq saying they had to take steps to protect their people.

GE holds some US$450 million in Iraqi contracts, mainly to rebuild electrical infrastructure and water treatment plants.

In Washington, US lawmakers pushed President George W. Bush's administration to flesh out plans for the June 30 handover of sovereignty to an interim government in Iraq.

"A detailed plan is necessary to prove to our allies and to Iraqis that we have a strategy and that we are committed to making it work," said Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar.