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Iraq still lacks power, water and govt

AFP, Baghdad
Three months to the day after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, US forces Wednesday announced the arrest of two top Baathists, although rebuilding efforts foundered with large parts of Baghdad still lacking power and water.
The US boss for Iraq, Paul Bremer, barnstormed the country's Shiite heartland, touting Washington's project of transforming Iraq into a democracy, but skipped meeting community leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a moderate considered receptive to US forces.
Mizban Khadr al-Hadi, a former high-ranking regional Baath Party leader and member of the decision-making Revolution Command Council, turned himself in to US troops in Baghdad on Tuesday, according to the US Central Command.
Former interior minister Mahmud Dhiyab al-Ahmad was captured on the same day at a location in Iraq that the command has not identified.
The Central Command also announced the seizure on Tuesday of between 400 and 500 rocket-propelled grenades -- the resistance's weapons of choice -- in a vehicle travelling west of Baghdad, whose four Iraqi passengers were arrested.
Despite the big name catches, there was no pause in the attacks on US soldiers which seem to have picked up despite a barrage of US military offensives this past month in central Iraq, the hub of support for Saddam.
Gunmen fired rocket-propelled grenades overnight at US positions in the hotspot town of Fallujah, west of the capital.
The US-led coalition, tasked
with rebuilding the infrastructure, schools and hospitals alongside conducting security operations, has downplayed the violence which has claimed the lives of at least 29 US soldiers since May.
Bremer said Tuesday that the attacks were the last desperate acts of a dying regime and did not represent the threat of a coordinated guerrilla force, as many fear.
With an eye on reconstruction, Bremer visited the holy city of Najaf Wednesday but met neither Sistani nor any other figures from the powerful Hawza, the highest Shiite religious body in Iraq, as Washington treads cautiously with the community making up 60 percent of the country.
The civil administrator said US President George W. Bush had a vision of "a unified Iraq" with a "democratically elected government which is representative of all strands of Iraqi society".
Washington fears Shiite ties with their brethren in neighboring Iran's Islamic republic, a long-time nemesis of the United States.
The coalition announced recruitment for the new Iraqi army would begin July 19, with an initial two-month basic training course kicking off August 2 -- the anniversary of Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait -- and churning out the country's first 1,000-strong light mechanised infantry battalion in October.
The coalition aims to have a 12,000-strong army within a year and a 40,000-member force in two years as one of a slew of steps to create a new Iraq, far removed from the memory of Saddam.