US mounts major assault on rebels

BAGHDAD - US forces have launched a major offensive against insurgents, which it says is the biggest air assault since the 2003 US-led invasion.

The offensive against guerrillas north of Baghdad occurred amid US concern about the political paralysis and mounting sectarian bloodshed.

It occurred as Iraq's new parliament held only a brief first session as deadlock remained over forming a broad government to avert any slide to civil war.

A US military statement said the operation near Samarra, 100km from Baghdad, involved more than 1,500 Iraqi and US troops, 50 warplanes and 200 armoured vehicles.

But a Pentagon official, who asked not to be named, sought to play down the scale of the operation against the insurgents, who gather their support from the minority Sunni Arab community, once dominant under Saddam Hussein.

"It's not precision bombs and things like that," the official said in Washington. Another said most of the aircraft involved were Blackhawk troop-carrying helicopters.

Four village areas near Samarra -- where an alleged al Qaeda bomb destroyed a Shi'ite Muslim shrine last month, triggering weeks of sectarian bloodshed -- had been surrounded by Iraqi and US troops since Wednesday, Iraqi military sources said.

The US military said weapons had been found in "Operation Swarmer" and that the mission would last for several days.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said the operation was proof of the increasing capability of Iraqi troops and was designed to "root out" insurgents.

The parliamentary session, which might have been a high point of a US-backed process that began with the invasion to overthrow Saddam, was reduced to 20 minutes of protocol that did little but meet a constitutional deadline.

"It is just something we have to get off our backs," a top parliamentarian said on condition of anonymity. "Then we'll go and sit at the negotiating table and yell at each other."

With no agreement among Shi'ites, Sunnis, Kurds and others on the posts of speaker, president, prime minister or cabinet members, no substantive business can be conducted in parliament.

Even the keynote address by Adnan Pachachi, the oldest member and acting speaker, was cut short by a powerful Shi'ite Islamist leader when Pachachi, a secular Sunni, launched into a criticism of "sectarian domination" -- a clear attack on the past year's rule by the Shi'ite-led interim government.

"We have to tell the world there will be no civil war among the Iraqi people. The risk is there," the patrician Pachachi, foreign minister in the 1960s, told the 275-seat chamber in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone government compound.

Reliable security forces were the top priority, he said.

A curfew has curbed sectarian violence that has killed hundreds in the capital in the past three weeks.

Kurds in the north stormed and destroyed a memorial to a 1988 gas attack in the town of Halabja during 18th anniversary ceremonies. Some 5,000 people were killed in the attack, blamed on Saddam.

One person was killed and eight were wounded when Kurdish forces fired on protesters, who were complaining about a lack of funding for local services in the town.

- REUTERS