US to reinstate some sacked Iraq officials

1.00pm

BAGHDAD - US authorities say some senior Iraqi officials purged after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would be restored to duties in an overhaul of what had been a keystone policy of the occupation.

The review could allow some former members of Saddam's Baath Party to join an interim Iraqi government being put together by the United Nations, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said on Thursday.

Around 400,000 people were thrown out of work last May when US administrator Paul Bremer dissolved the armed forces, security services and defence and information ministries. An appeals system was set up to allow them to reclaim jobs.

But there has been widespread criticism that the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, most of whose members went into exile during the Saddam years, had gone too far in excluding skilled former senior Baath members.

"The appeals process sometimes has been slower im implementation than was originally designed," US spokesman Dan Senor told a Baghdad news conference. Thousands of Iraqis had complained to Bremer about it.

"We want (the policy) to be implemented in the way it was designed," he said.

Those who were Baath Party members in name only would be welcomed, spokesmen said, but those tainted by their role in Saddam's "brutal" regime before it was toppled a year ago would remain excluded.

The top echelons of the Baath Party were drawn mainly from Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority to which Saddam himself belonged.

Insurgents in Sunni heartlands north and west of Baghdad have put up the stiffest resistance to the US-led occupation, partly because the community has felt penalised and excluded from power since Saddam's fall.

The centre of the Sunni resistance has been in Fallujah, where hundreds of people have been killed since US Marines launched a crackdown on the town shortly after four American security men were killed and mutilated there on March 31.

Witnesses said Fallujah front lines were calm on Thursday, though clashes erupted in the nearby town of Karma. A local official said police were collecting heavy weapons from fighters in Fallujah under a peace deal announced on Sunday.

But Lieutenant-General James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in western Iraq, said the response to the deal with Fallujah civic leaders had been disappointing.

"We are not pleased at all with the turnover that we saw yesterday," he told reporters at Camp Fallujah, a US base close to the town. He described the weapons as "junk".

Conway questioned the ability of civic leaders in Fallujah to persuade the insurgents to disarm and warned guerrillas in the battered city they had "days not weeks" to disarm or risk a renewed US offensive.

Since the Marine crackdown began, there has been a spate of kidnappings of foreigners and assaults on them. Kidnappers freed two Swiss nationals and a Palestinian on Thursday, but several other foreign hostages remained missing.

A gunman killed a South African security guard in a Baghdad supermarket, an attack that underscored the risks facing foreigners. He was shot in the head by a lone assailant in a shop in the Sunni Muslim Adhamiya district. His Iraqi translator was also injured.

"A gunman came in and shot them both," said Aslan Khalil, a supermarket employee. "When the gunman came in, he told us: 'This is a Jew, how do you deal with him and sell to him?"'

Hostility to Israel for its treatment of Palestinians runs high in Iraq, and those opposed to the occupation often accuse their enemies of being Jews or tied to Israel.

At least 26 foreign civilians and private security guards have been killed in violence in March and April, including an Italian killed by kidnappers. About 50 foreigners have been abducted this month. Most have been freed unharmed.

In the mainly Shi'ite southern city of Basra, families mourned their dead after suicide bombers killed 73 people, 20 of them children, most burned alive in a bus on their way to school.

The death toll rose to 73 after five of the 99 wounded died overnight, hospital officials said.

The blasts at three police stations in Basra, and at the police academy in nearby Zubeir, a mainly Sunni town, were the bloodiest attacks in the British-controlled zone since the start of the US-led occupation a year ago.

US President George W. Bush has accused Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network of carrying out the bombings.

US company Research Triangle International said captors freed one of its employees, George Yaakob Razuq, a Palestinian with an Israeli identity card who had been held since April 8.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq