Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News

BAGHDAD, 8 June 2004 — Interim government Prime Minister Iyad Allawi announced a deal yesterday to disband Iraq’s powerful militias, in what was seen as a major step toward avoiding a civil war among the nation’s sects and pressuring renegade armed groups.

And US Secretary of State Colin Powell said he hoped an agreement would be reached yesterday on a new UN Security Council resolution to smooth the way to Iraq’s June 30 transfer of power.

Meanwhile, a mystery explosion at a mosque in Kufa killed two people and wounded nine, medics said, highlighting the fragility of a de facto truce between militiamen and US troops that had seemed to be taking hold.

The explosion shook the latest truce effort. Some witnesses, including from Sadr’s Mehdi Army, said a missile had hit a weapons depot inside the mosque compound, but a Sadr official blamed the blaze on an electrical short circuit that lit up chemical supplies. Firemen battled the blaze sparked by the explosion, amid confusion over the cause of the blast.

“I am happy to announce today the successful completion of negotiations on the nationwide transition and reintegration of militias and other armed forces previously outside of state control,” Allawi said in a statement.

The deal announced by the premier marks the implementation of a clause in the transitional law drafted with the US-led coalition, after nine armed organizations signed on, including the Kurdish peshmerga fighters and the Shiite Badr Brigades.

“Just under 60 percent will pass into the Iraqi security services and the rest will be reintegrated back into civil society”, with most of them reintegrated by January and the rest by the spring, the statement said.

The deal makes a marked distinction between the nine parties’ militias, classifying them as resistance fighters to Saddam Hussein, and the Mehdi Army, the militia of Shiite radical cleric Moqtada Sadr that has been waging an uprising against US troops.