RADICAL IRAQI CLERIC ORDERS HIS FIGHTERS TO PUT DOWN THEIR ARMS

 Artículo de SOMINI SENGUPTA and EDWARD WONG en “The New York Times” del 17/06/2004

Por su interés y relevancia, he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L. B.-B.)

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 16 - Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militiamen have tormented American soldiers in Iraq with ambushes and rocket attacks for nearly three months, ordered his fighters on Wednesday to put down their arms and go home.

The edict, issued at Mr. Sadr's headquarters in Najaf, a Shiite holy city, came days after he declared his intentions to enter mainstream politics as the new Iraqi government assumes full power.

In Najaf, his loyalists appeared to be heeding the order. But it did little to stanch the daily violence across the country. Two American soldiers were killed and nearly two dozen wounded in a rocket attack in Balad, 50 miles north of here. An Iraqi policeman was killed and five civilians wounded in a bomb attack in Ramadi, about 60 miles west of here.

A senior Oil Ministry official was assassinated early Wednesday in Kirkuk, in the north. And further crippling Iraqi oil exports, insurgents blasted a hole in a crucial oil pipeline near the southern city of Basra. There have been at least three such attacks in as many days, clearly intended to debilitate the country's economic engine before the transfer of limited power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30. Iraq's main oil

[A car bomb exploded Thursday near a United States and Iraqi military base in Baghdad, killing at least two people, a witness told the Reuters news agency. The bomb went off at an Iraq Army recruiting base in the city's heavily fortified Muthanna airport, where United States troops are also based.]

The violence came as a poll ordered by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority found that a majority of Iraqis believed that they would be safer without United States forces in their country and that all Americans behaved the way the guards did in the photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The poll results, which were not released, were first reported by The Associated Press.

A coalition spokesman, Dan Senor, called the poll results understandable. "It reflects the fact that Iraqis, like most people, don't like to be occupied," he said in a CNN interview. "We don't like to be occupiers." He added, "Of course most Iraqis don't feel safe, and of course they say that it's happening under our watch."

In leaflets distributed widely in Najaf, Mr. Sadr ordered his fighters to "go back to their provinces" in keeping with a cease-fire signed on June 4 that had been regularly broken. Since then, many members of the cleric's militia, known as the Mahdi Army, have disappeared from Najaf and Kufa, a nearby Shiite holy city, but many others who live in those cities have remained.

In recent days, Mr. Sadr has taken efforts to remake himself into a player in Iraq's emerging political landscape. He has offered his conditional approval to the interim government and, through his spokesman, Qais al-Khazali, floated the idea of organizing a political party.

American administrators have issued an order banning people associated with illegal militias from taking part in elections.

An architect of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, arrived in Baghdad on Wednesday for meetings with Iraqi interim government officials, including Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. A joint statement called the talks "the beginning of a new relationship."

As part of that new relationship, American administrators will turn over civil aviation operations at Baghdad International Airport to the interim government after June 30, occupation officials said Wednesday. The military side is scheduled to be turned over by mid-August.

Virtually all American soldiers will move from the airport, the officials said. Many of them will relocate to Camp Victory, next to the airport, while the First Armored Division, which uses the airport as its headquarters, is scheduled to return home in July, after 15 months in Iraq.

Security at the airport will be provided by a foreign private contractor working with Iraqi forces, said an American adviser to the Ministry of Transportation. Bids were taken for the contract, and the winner will be announced in the next day or two, he said. Custer Battles, an American contractor, currently provides security for parts of the airport. The adviser, an aviation expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the transfer was a way to return a symbolic public site to the Iraqis.

Clearly, the greatest threat to the new government is the campaign against the oil industry, Iraq's main revenue source. Early Wednesday, Ghazi Talabani, security chief for the northern oil fields in Kirkuk, was killed in an ambush, an Oil Ministry official confirmed shortly after an explosion heavily damaged a northern crude oil pipeline.

Analysts have said repairs to the large southern oil export terminal could take up to 10 days, and cost up to $1 billion in revenues.

Meanwhile, the United States Army charged an American soldier with the murder of an Iraqi civilian, according to The Associated Press. Officials said the victim was wounded in a high-speed chase near the city of Kufa last month and then shot at close range by an officer in the First Armored Division. The soldier's name has not yet been released.

Also Wednesday, aides of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric, said he had sent a delegation to meet with Kurdish leaders. He has objected to provisions in the transitional administrative law, which is supposed to give guidance to the interim government, that essentially give Kurds veto power over a permanent constitution to be written next year. The leaders of the two main Kurdish parties objected to Ayatollah Sistani's stand and wrote a strongly worded letter to President Bush saying they would refrain from taking part in the country's government if their effective veto were removed.

In Washington, Democratic members of Congress challenged statements by administration officials on Wednesday that a collection of United Nations Security Council resolutions and letters exchanged between the United States and the new Iraqi leadership would be sufficient to define the authority and legal basis of operations for American forces in Iraq after June 30.

Absent a formal "status of forces agreement," similar to what the United States has negotiated with most nations where American forces are based, that kind of understanding "is not as strong as it needs to be," said Representative Ellen O. Tauscher, Democrat of California.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article.