The U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, acknowledged Friday that mistakes had been made in the occupation of the country and invited former Iraqi army officers who served under ousted president Saddam Hussein to help establish a new national force.
Bremer's statements came the same day a rebellious Shiite cleric, Moqtada Sadr, threatened to launch suicide bombings if U.S. forces entered the holy city of Najaf, where he has taken refuge. "We will all be time bombs in the face of the enemy," Sadr told followers at Friday prayers.
Bremer said Iraq's newly named minister of defense would meet with "vetted senior officers from the former regime next week to discuss how best to build the new Iraqi military establishment." Bremer also conceded that a policy barring teachers who were members of the former ruling Baath Party from returning to work had been poorly administered.
He also appealed for Iraqis to rally around the American-led effort to establish security in the country one year into its occupation.
A coalition spokesman said Bremer was not abandoning a sweeping "de-Baathification" edict designed to purge Iraq of the oppressive political apparatus installed by Hussein.
But Bremer's statements, broadcast twice Friday and scheduled to be aired again in coming days, signaled a more inclusive approach by the occupation authority, which has been rattled by insurgent attacks across much of Iraq this month and disappointed by the performance of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces who were asked to help contain the violence. U.S. officials have said 40 percent of Iraqi police walked off the job when Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, seized control of Najaf and the adjacent town of Kufa on April 4.
"We recognize that we cannot provide real security unless Iraqis stand shoulder to shoulder with us," Bremer said.
In Basra, where five car bombs killed 74 people Wednesday, police arrested two men in a truck carrying three tons of TNT and three others in a house containing more than a ton of explosives, the Associated Press reported. Twenty more tons of explosives were discovered at a second house.
The news agency cited a police official as saying that the five men confessed to preparing eight car bombs and were working with a Syrian affiliated with al Qaeda who travels frequently to Kuwait.
Also Friday, one U.S. military fatality was reported. A soldier with the 1st Armored Division was killed by an improvised explosive device near Samarra, 62 miles north of Baghdad. His death brought to at least 510 the number of Americans killed in combat in Iraq, including more than 100 this month, since the March 2003 invasion.
[Early Saturday, the U.S. military said a Marine assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died Thursday of wounds incurred in combat on April 14 in Anbar province, which includes the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi, the Reuters news agency reported.]
According to Pentagon figures released Friday, almost 900 soldiers and Marines have been wounded since April 1, more than triple the monthly average. Of the 595 wounded in action in the two weeks since the last report, 257 returned to duty after treatment.
Fighting has ebbed in the past week, but militia fighters ambushed a coalition patrol Friday in Karbala, killing a Bulgarian soldier before burning and looting a 2 1/2-ton military truck. Mahdi Army fighters roam freely in the city, considered the second-holiest in Shiite Islam after Najaf, where a force of 2,000 U.S. soldiers and armor waits on the outskirts.
U.S. commanders have said they will "kill or capture" Sadr if given the opportunity. But Bremer assured Iraqis that the coalition preferred to work with more senior Shiite leaders to disarm Sadr's militia there. "We in the coalition recognize the holy nature of these cities," Bremer said.
Sadr broached the possibility of suicide bombings during his regular Friday sermon in Kufa.
"Some of the mujaheddin brothers have told me they want to carry out martyrdom attacks, but I am postponing this," he told an audience of thousands. "When we are forced to do so, and when our city and holy sites are attacked, we will all be time bombs in the face of the enemy."
"My goal is to liberate Iraq," Sadr said, calling on Arab nations to support the insurgency. He equated the plight of Iraqis to that of Palestinians and vowed to avenge Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi this month "by act, not speech."
In prayers at another major mosque in Baghdad, a Sunni cleric warned U.S. commanders not to launch another attack on Fallujah.
"We warn you against another massacre in Fallujah," said Ahmed Abdul-Ghafoor Samaraie. "If there will be more bloodletting and more people killed in Fallujah, one hundred Fallujahs will stand against you."
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the joint task force in Iraq , said residents of the city continued to defy the terms of a peace agreement, including failing to turn in heavy weapons and offering up instead only a few rusty old guns.
Echoing field commanders who have warned of a renewed U.S. offensive "within days," Kimmitt also brushed aside distinctions between Fallujah residents who might favor peace and the foreign fighters and other zealots who Bremer said were "holding the city hostage from within."
"Our soldiers and our Marines have the inherent right of self-defense," Kimmitt said. "Whether that is somebody who is trying to defend their city, which seems to be somewhat of a ludicrous concept, or somebody who's just out to kill an American, both of those will find the full force of the United States Marine Corps and the coalition brought down on them."
In his speech, Bremer reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to turning over sovereign control of Iraq on June 30 to a caretaker government to be appointed by a U. N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi.
On Friday, a U.N. spokesman distanced the institution from Brahimi's remarks in a French radio interview Thursday, in which the former Algerian foreign minister said U.S. support for Israel was making his job in Iraq harder.
"The problems are linked, there is no doubt about it," Brahimi said. "The big poison in the region is the Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians."
Special correspondents Saad Sarhan in Kufa and Nasir Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.
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