US commander seeking 10,000 more troops for Iraq

BAGHDAD - The head of the United States Central Command in Iraq, General John Abizaid, has asked the Pentagon to send 10,000 more troops to Iraq to quell the uprising, backtracking on a year-long aim to reduce the US military presence.

Abizaid has asked the Pentagon for an extra two combat brigades and said some troops from the Army's 1st Armoured Division would stay in Iraq for longer than expected. The entire division had been scheduled to leave by the end of next month but units had been sent to regain control of Kut.

Abizaid also said that some US-trained Iraqi policemen had defected to the insurgent forces of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and other Iraqi security forces had failed to fulfil their duties.

A battalion of the Iraqi Army refused to fight in Fallujah.

"These numbers are not large but they are troubling to us, and clearly we've got to work on the Iraqi security forces," he said.

The severity of the fighting in Iraq this month has often been more intense than anything seen in the three-week war to overthrow Saddam Hussein last year, when the Allied forces suffered only 89 combat deaths.

The exact number of Iraqi dead is uncertain because in Fallujah, scene of some of the worst losses, people are unable to reach the cemetery and are burying their dead in graves in two football fields. A grave-digger said 300 people were buried in one.

A spokesman said yesterday that the US-led forces in Iraq have lost 70 soldiers this month and killed 10 times as many Iraqi insurgents in by far the bloodiest period since the end of the war.

Iraqi doctors say their dead are mostly civilians, the majority women and children.

At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the US, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days. The occupation authorities have kept the figures secret.

Lieutenant-General Mark Kimmett admitted yesterday that "about 70" American and other Western troops had died during the Iraqi insurgency since April 1 but he made no mention of the mercenaries, apparently fearful that the full total of Western dead would have a serious political effect.

He also did not give a figure for Iraqi dead, which may be as high as 900.

At least 18,000 mercenaries, many of them employed to protect US troops and personnel, are believed to be in Iraq, some of them earning US$1000 a day. But their companies rarely acknowledge their losses unless - like the four Americans murdered and mutilated in Fallujah three weeks ago - their deaths are already public knowledge.

Although many of the heavily armed Western security men are working for the US Department of Defence - and most are former Special Forces soldiers - they are not catalogued as serving military personnel. Their losses can therefore be hidden from public view.

The US authorities in Iraq , however, are well aware that more Western mercenaries lost their lives in the past week than occupation soldiers over the past 14 days.

In an effort to toughen the Iraqi forces, Abizaid said the US military will reach out to former senior members of Saddam's disbanded Army - a reversal in strategy. The military in the past has tried to avoid relying on top officials from the ousted regime.

Yesterday as a tenuous ceasefire held in Fallujah, al-Sadr was on the retreat, pulling his militiamen out of parts of the holy city of Najaf in hopes of averting a US assault.

The withdrawal of al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia from police stations and Government buildings in Najaf, Karbala and Kufa was a key US demand.

But al-Sadr followers rebuffed a US demand to disband the militia.

American troops were seen on the outskirts of Najaf, where al-Sadr is thought to be in his office.

The top US commander in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, said "the mission of US forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr".

US troops last night arrested a representative of al-Sadr, Hazem al-Aaraji, at a hotel in Baghdad.

The son of Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, met al-Sadr yesterday, telling him al-Sistani rejected any military move against al-Sadr and the holy city, said a person who attended the meeting.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq