Clashes Pierce Iraqi Cease-Fires

Fighting Erupts With Sadr Forces in Najaf and Baghdad

BAGHDAD, June 10 -- Street fighting erupted between Iraqi police and Shiite Muslim militiamen in Najaf on Thursday, shaking a five-day-old truce that had restored peace to the holy city after weeks of clashes between Shiite fighters and U.S. occupation troops.

Within hours, U.S. soldiers in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City were trading gunfire with members of the same Shiite militia, breaking several days of calm and ruining plans for a more formal cease-fire in the capital's most densely populated neighborhood. Residents said automatic rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades were heard throughout the afternoon.

The Najaf battle took place in the center of the city 90 miles south of Baghdad and did not involve U.S. soldiers, according to a senior military official. As part of the Najaf cease-fire reached last Friday, U.S. forces pledged to stay away from the downtown area and its Shiite shrines, leaving security there to U.S.-trained Iraqi police.

But the clashes showed that the Mahdi Army, the militia of Moqtada Sadr, a defiant Shiite cleric combating the U.S. occupation, has remained in Najaf as an armed force that can reemerge at will, able to challenge the freshly organized Iraqi police forces assigned to assure security and represent government authority.

As its part of the cease-fire deal, Sadr's militia had promised to avoid any open armed presence in Najaf and the neighboring city of Kufa. But it swiftly returned to the streets as soon as the fighting with police broke out in the early morning -- and just as swiftly seized the initiative, capturing a number of policemen.

The militia's quick show of force, and the police response, suggested the depth of the problems that the U.S. military faces as it seeks to have Iraqi soldiers and policemen gradually replace U.S. occupation troops in the weeks and months ahead. With sovereignty being turned over in principle to Iraqi authorities on June 30, U.S. occupation forces have become eager to reduce their role -- or at least their visibility -- in running the country.

"It still remains our aspiration to turn over security control to Iraqi forces," a senior military official said. "But this is not a calendar-driven process," he added, meaning that the turnover can happen only when U.S.-trained and -supplied Iraqi forces are capable of assuming responsibility. "This is not paternalism," he said, "this is reality."

Hospital officials in Najaf said Thursday's fighting, which broke out around midnight and lasted all morning, wounded two dozen Iraqis and killed seven, including three militiamen and four civilians. One policeman was reported wounded.

A number of Iraqi policemen were seen being taken into custody by Mahdi Army fighters, who seized a downtown police station and later turned it over to looters. After the station was emptied of furniture and equipment, it was set afire. Several four-wheel-drive vehicles with police markings were also burned in front of the torched station house.

The U.S.-appointed governor of Najaf, Adnan Zurufi, told reporters that negotiations were underway with Sadr's lieutenants to restore the cease-fire. But he said U.S. troops would be called in again if necessary.

Qais Hazali, a Sadr spokesman in Najaf, said shooting broke out after a police patrol fired on militiamen near an office of the charitable Islamic Works Organization. "What truce?" he said. "The Iraqi police started it."

Witnesses said, however, that the fighting began after militiamen challenged police seeking to arrest Mahdi Army members carrying rifles in violation of the cease-fire terms. Whatever the spark that set it off, the confrontation quickly involved several armed militia units whose fighters swiftly overpowered the police, the witnesses said.

U.S. troops and Sadr's followers in eastern Baghdad's Sadr City quarter had largely avoided clashes in the past several days, after U.S. forces pulled out of a police station they had occupied just down the street from one of Sadr's offices. The office director, a black-turbaned cleric named Hassan Adhari, had predicted the area would remain calm as long as the American soldiers stayed out of the neighborhood.

The new clashes broke out after U.S. troops in armored vehicles entered the slum's rutted streets to take someone into custody, said a well-connected resident, Ahmed Manfi. As a result, a peacemaking meeting between a prominent religious leader and U.S. officers was called off, he said.