Agencies  --  Arab News

BAGHDAD, 22 May 2004 — US aircraft with devastating firepower yesterday pounded Shiite militia in Karbala, killing an unknown number, in a bid to crush fighters whose demands for Americans to go are gaining support among Iraqis frustrated with the occupation.

The US-led forces also struggled with political controversy, as Iraqi politicians decried a raid against one of their own, gunbattles with militiamen raged and new claims of prisoner abuse emerged.

Marking a growing rift between Washington and its closest Iraqi allies, the Iraq Governing Council roundly condemned the US authority that appointed them for a raid by US troops and Iraqi police on the offices of Council member Ahmad Chalabi.

“The Governing Council unanimously condemned the raids on Mr. Chalabi’s home and holds the coalition authorities responsible,” said Samir Al-Askari, deputy council representative for Shiite member Mohammed Bahr Al-Uloom. Askari, who confirmed that Chalabi was at the extraordinary meeting, said the Governing Council would hold talks with US overseer Paul Bremer today to ensure that “such incidents do not happen again”.

For his part, Kurdish council member Mahmud Osman said it was “unacceptable for a member of the council to be treated in such a way without prior warning”.

“We have unanimously condemned these raids which were politically motivated and illegal. It was the Americans who were responsible,” he added.

The coalition has distanced itself from involvement in the operations, saying only that the raids were Iraqi-led. The head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, praised the operation in comments to the House of Representatives’ Armed Services Committee in Washington.

“It was the Iraqi police who conducted the activity, that the role for US forces was as an outer cordon, not part of the activity in any of the facilities,” he said.

Despite pressure on his Mehdi Army fighters in Karbala that included the use of a devastating AC-130 airborne gunship, top Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr slipped from his refuge among the shrines of nearby Najaf to deliver a defiant sermon. “Don’t let my death end your resistance. Continue and God will give you victory,” Sadr told worshipers at Kufa Mosque, as his fighters skirmished with American soldiers nearby.

A close aide to radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr was arrested yesterday by US troops as he was heading back from Kufa to Najaf, according to an official in Sadr’s office. Mohammed Tabtabai was arrested along with his companion at around 2:00 p.m. (1000 GMT), shortly after Sadr finished giving his weekly sermon at the Kufa Mosque, said the official.

“Hakim and his bodyguard were arrested by American forces and their driver was killed when they left Kufa by a secondary road for Najaf after Friday prayers,” said a statement from Sadr’s office. Tabtabai, who is also a cleric, usually stands right behind Sadr during the Friday sermon.

Among those killed during hours of heavy fighting in Karbala was an Iraqi working for Arab television channel Al-Jazeera.

The US military said it was investigating accounts that an airstrike on a desert hamlet on Wednesday killed not 40 or so foreign fighters, as US officers say, but a wedding party. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman, said four to six women may have died in the incident.

The top UN human rights official, Bertand Ramcharan, condemned the attack, however, whatever the reasons for it: “The acting United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has expressed shock over the deaths of some 40 civilians at a wedding party in Iraq near the Syrian border,” his office said in a statement. “Even if there are security-related concerns, there can be no license to commit carnage.”

Iraqi political leaders have become noticeably more critical of US attempts to stamp out Sadr’s uprising. Backing the Americans does not look the most fruitful strategy for anyone hoping for power in Iraqi elections due in the new year.

Notable among these is Chalabi, once the Pentagon’s tip to succeed Saddam and now at daggers drawn with US authorities. He won backing from colleagues on the Governing Council when they met yesterday to condemn a raid on his Baghdad offices.

Washington is seeking a UN resolution to endorse its plan. Some of its allies are pressing it to hand over greater power.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Lebanese Shiites in white shrouds marched in Beirut yesterday in a collective show of their willingness to die in defense of holy shrines in US-occupied Iraq.

Clinching their fists and chanting “death to America, death to Israel”, a white sea of men, women and children swept across the streets of a mainly Shiite Beirut suburb in a massive show of strength by the Hezbollah resistance group.

Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, addressing the crowd, demanded US forces leave Karbala and Najaf and said Muslims and Arabs were facing the same enemy — the United States and Israel. “Today, we must fully understand that the battle is one, the enemy is one and that we are facing one camp, the American-Israeli camp,” Nasrallah said.