BAGHDAD, 21 August 2004 — Militiamen loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr yesterday removed their weapons from the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf and handed it over to Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric.
“The keys (to the mosque) were handed to the office (in Najaf),” Sistani’s spokesman Sayed Murtadha Al-Kashmiri told Agence France Presse in London where the cleric has been receiving medical treatment.
In Najaf, Sadr’s spokesman Sheikh Ahmed Al-Shaibany confirmed the handover. “The process of handing over the shrine has been completed,” Shaibany said.
Earlier in Baghdad, Interior Ministry spokesman Sabah Kadhim said police entered the mosque and arrested 400 armed militants without incident.
“They are liars,” one militiaman said hours later as he reclined on carpets in the mosque compound in Najaf sipping tea with comrades. “We’re ready to give up the shrine, but never to police.” Not a single Iraqi policeman could be seen anywhere around the compound. At 5.30 p.m. the huge doors of the mosque were locked.
The surprise pullback came a day after Iraq’s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, threatened to storm the mosque. Throughout Thursday, US warplanes bombed militia positions in the town in fighting that killed 77 people and wounded 70 others.
In a Friday sermon read on his behalf in the nearby Kufa Mosque, Sadr said he wanted the religious authorities to take control of the Old City from his Mehdi Army.
In US airstrikes on the Sunni bastion of Fallujah, two Iraqis were killed and 11 others wounded. The planes targeted the industrial zone of the city, said Dr. Ahmed Shakir Khadouri from the Fallujah general hospital. The security guards were killed on Thursday night and three women and a child were wounded in the second attack on an ice cream factory early yesterday. Seven people were admitted to the hospital after the Thursday night raid.
Near Samarra, two US soldiers were killed and three wounded when their patrol was attacked, a US military spokesman said. “The US patrol was attacked by an improvised explosive device at around 5.55 p.m., killing one soldier instantly, while the other succumbed to wounds later,” the spokesman said. “The condition of the other three wounded is stable.”
According to the latest figures on the Pentagon website, 708 US soldiers have now been killed in action in Iraq by the forces of Saddam Hussein and the insurgency which followed his fall in April 2003.
A shadowy Islamist group meanwhile announced the purported seizure of 12 Nepalese men for cooperating with US forces, according to a statement posted on a website.
The statement listed the names of the 12 “infidels,” who it said had been helping the “US crusader forces to fight Islam.”
The statement did not say where the 12 were seized but the group promised to publish their pictures soon “so that they will serve as a lesson to others.”
— Additional input from agencies
