Battles flare as US vows to arrest cleric

Followers of radical cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr fought pitched battles with foreign troops in Shi’ite strongholds on Tuesday and vowed to p...

Followers of radical cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr fought pitched battles with foreign troops in Shi’ite strongholds on Tuesday and vowed to pursue an uprising that has claimed more than 130 lives in three days.

Since Sunday the US military has suffered 19 combat deaths in Iraq — 11 of them in clashes in Shi’ite areas and six in Al-Anbar province where Marines have launched a major mission to root out guerrillas in Falluja and Ramadi.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, in London for talks with British PM Tony Blair, said thousands more troops might be needed to maintain order. Blair is due in Washington next week to discuss the spiralling violence in Iraq and West Asia with Bush. Echoing the US President’s message yesterday, Blair said that the growing Shi’ite uprising will only reinforce the coalition’s determination to build democratic institutions and hand over power on schedule.

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US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said if commanders requested additional forces, they would be sent. A Ukrainian soldier and a Bulgarian civilian truck driver were killed in Shi’ite regions of southern Iraq. The Ukrainian soldier was killed in a blast near Kut that also wounded five others. The Bulgarian was killed when a convoy of six trucks was attacked south of Nassiriya.

Qays Al-Khazali, one of Sadr’s aides, compared the uprising to a 1991 Shi’ite rebellion eventually crushed by Saddam Hussein and said it would go on until the cleric’s demands were met.

In another development, a man claiming to be Musab Al-Zarqawi, a senior Al Qaeda figure that the US believes is operating in Iraq, released a tape calling for the country’s Sunni Muslims to fight Shi’ites and claiming responsibility for high-profile attacks there. The 33-minute audiotape appeared today on a website. The speaker claimed responsibility for a March 17 car bombing of a Baghdad hotel that killed seven people.

The speaker also said that his group carried out the assassination of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqr Al-Hakim, the leader of Iraq’s largest Shi’ite party. Meanwhile, a media report in Tokyo said Japanese troops will suspend operations in Samawah, 100 km away from Najaf where pitched battles were being fought.

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About 500 Japanese soldiers have been ordered to halt work on repairing roads until after the Shi’ite holy day of Arbaeen on April 11, Kyodo News reported. A senior Defence agency official Iwao Kitahara was quoted as saying that the order was given as a precautionary measure ‘‘to ensure the safety of the troops’’.