Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News

BAGHDAD, 3 June 2004 — Fresh fighting claimed at least 13 lives in Iraq yesterday, casting a pall over the first day at work of the new interim government, which faces an uphill struggle to earn legitimacy at home and abroad in the wake of its turbulent formation.

Clashes broke out between US forces and Shiite militiamen, hospital sources and officials said as truce efforts unraveled.

In Kufa, six people were killed and 32 wounded in clashes which began Tuesday night between US soldiers and members of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr’s militia, said doctors at the southern town’s Al-Furat Al-Awsat hospital.

In the nearby city of Najaf, one person was killed and 12 injured when three mortar shells hit an industrial zone close to a US base, a medical source at the Hakim hospital said. Two militiamen were also killed in Baghdad’s Shiite slum of Sadr City, an official from Sadr’s office there said.

Two car bomb attacks in the capital killed five people and wounded 35.

Freshly appointed President Ghazi Al-Yawar said he wants to lay the foundation for a new Iraq based on security and reconciliation, but UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warned the appointed government would need to work hard to earn legitimacy and quickly establish links with US-led military forces as the handover of power rapidly approaches.

The appointment of Yawar and the interim government sworn in on Tuesday won plaudits from many countries, but there was still concern about a new UN resolution on Iraq, which could keep foreign troops there until possibly 2006.

“My great ambition is to fulfill the goal of all Iraqis: The return of security and stability, without which no progress can be made on any other front,” Yawar told Al-Mada newspaper in an interview to be published today.

Yawar, a 46-year-old Sunni tribal leader and business magnate from the northern city of Mosul, was named Iraq’s first president in post-Saddam Iraq.

“A complete national reconciliation is essential for building a new Iraq,” he said, adding that meant many who served on the fringes of Saddam’s regime but committed no crimes should be reintegrated into society.

But the new government, which the United States had a strong role in shaping, faces difficulty in earning legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis, warned Brahimi.

“None of us should forget that ultimately it is only an elected government that can legitimately claim to represent the people of Iraq,” he said at a news conference.

“This government will therefore have its work cut out for it. It will not be easy for them to prove the skeptics wrong.”

Brahimi said he had been invited to choose the new Cabinet at the request of the Americans and the now-disbanded Governing Council, but as the governing power the view of the United States was certainly taken into consideration.

He said that US overseer in Iraq, Paul Bremer, had immense power. “I don’t think he’d mind my saying this: Bremer is the dictator of Iraq. He has the money, he has the signature,” said Brahimi.

— Additional input from agencies