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Sadr militias start handing in arms

Two GIs, 4 Iraqis killed in fighting

AFP, Baghdad
Radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr's militia began slowly turning in weapons Monday under a deal with the Iraqi government aimed at bringing a halt to months of deadly fighting in a Baghdad slum.
But anti-American attacks continued, with two US soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Baghdad and two Iraqis killed in a car bomb attack on a US military convoy in the northern
city of Mosul.
And armed men claiming to belong to the militant group of Iraq's most wanted man Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi appeared in a video threatening to behead a Turkish hostage.
In the teeming Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad, machine guns, mortar launchers and ammunition were trickling in to police stations under the five-day test agreement that could clear the road
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for a lasting truce in one of the major flashpoints of the Iraq insurgency.
A deal would shore up one flank for the US and Iraqi forces in the runup to national polls planned for January, allowing them to concentrate on Fallujah, the epicenter of the Sunni Muslim insurgency, and other trouble spots around central Iraq.
In Sadr City, police, many of them Sadr supporters, told AFP they thought the militiamen mistrusted the Iraqi government and the US military and feared the other side might take advantage of the truce to crush their movement.
Under the terms of the deal, described as a loose verbal pact, there is a five-day test period for the weapons surrender after which the Iraqi army will move in and patrol Sadr City, where the Shia militia has ruled by the gun for months, while the government has offered to free some detained Sadr supporters.
Intermediaries handed in weapons at one of three police stations serving as drop-off centres which had been cordoned off by police and Iraqi national guard. US army troops were also present at the sites.
At one station in the heart of the teeming district, about a dozen machine guns, 12 mortar rounds, 38 mortar launchers and a sniper rifle were handed in.
Sadr City, home to 2.5 million people, has been devastated by six months of fighting between the US army and Sadr's militia. Intense air strikes and street skirmishes are believed to have sharply reduced the militia's ranks from more than 10,000 followers to less than 2,000 since April, the US military says.
US battalion commander for Sadr City, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Volesky, warned that his men reserved the right to carry out raids and arrests despite the five-day test period for Sadr's men to relinquish heavy and medium weapons.
"There has been no ceasefire agreement. The freedom of our movement has not been limited in any way. If we get the intel (intelligence) to support doing a search or raid on a target we have that flexibility to do it," he said.
Iraqi national security advisor Kassem Daoud hailed the agreement Sunday and said the government had more than 500 million dollars to rebuild Sadr City, with 150 million dollars coming from the Americans.
Iraqi police and national guard will patrol Sadr City, and "the multinational force will intervene whenever is necessary," Daoud said. However, the Mehdi Army has insisted searches were not included in the deal.
If the Mehdi Army complies,
Daoud said Iraq will offer amnesty to militia members not wanted on criminal charges and release Sadr followers from detention centres.
The US military announced it had freed least 154 detainees from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq but said the releases were not linked to the Sadr initiative.
Elsewhere, two US soldiers were killed and five wounded in a rocket attack in the south of Baghdad, raising the number of soldiers killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to 1,067.
In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a suicide car bomb struck a US army convoy, killing two Iraqis and wounding 18, hospital sources said.
The blast rattled the city and blew a deep crater in the road and helmets lay on the ground from US soldiers, an AFP correspondent said.
Mosul, in the Sunni Muslim heartland, is the scene of frequent attacks on US and Iraqis security forces, along with civilians and political officials thought to back efforts to forge a democratic Iraq.
Another two Iraqis were killed in a firefight between insurgents and US marines in the rebel hotbed of Ramadi.
Eyeing January's high stakes elections, US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made an unannounced trip Sunday to Baghdad and the Al-Asad airbase in Fallujah's restive province of Al-Anbar for talks with Iraqi officials and US commanders.
Rumsfeld predicted a surge of violence ahead of Iraq's election, but hoped the polls would stabilise Iraq and allow a scaling back of US troops in its aftermath.
Meanwhile, militants loyal to Zarqawi -- the Jordanian Islamist wanted for a string of deadly attacks and beheadings of hostages in Iraq -- threatened in a video broadcast on Dubai's Al-Arabiya television to kill a Turkish hostage.
The group demanded the "release of all Iraqi prisoners and the departure of all Turkish nationals from Iraq" and threatened to "behead the hostage in three days if our demands are not met."
Three armed and masked men appeared in the video, with the hostage held on the floor in front of them.
On Sunday, another Islamist group announced it had released 10 Turkish hostages after their company pulled out of the country, AlJazeera television reported.