World

Troops Pound Shiite Gunmen

April 27, 2004 / 2:43 PM EDT / CBS/AP

U.S. troops fought militiamen overnight near the Shiite holy city of Najaf, killing 64 gunmen and destroying an anti-aircraft gun belonging to the insurgents, the U.S. military said Tuesday.

A U.S. soldier was killed in fighting with Shiite gunmen in Baghdad.

As the United Nations prepares to discuss the form of a caretaker government due to take power June 30, U.S.-appointed Iraqi leaders complained that the administration won't have real sovereignty as promised by American administrators for months.

If the government can't make laws or provide security "it will not be real sovereignty," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Governing Council. "The less sovereignty there is, the less the possibility that the government will be able to work and achieve its tasks."

U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who has proposed a caretaker government to take over on June 30, was to brief the Security Council on Tuesday.

"Brahimi remains the sole negotiator with credibility to devise a possible path through dangerous terrain," said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk, "and both U.N. and U.S. negotiators are relying on his outline for a caretaker government."

In other developments:

The U.S. forces killed and wounded Monday in an explosion while searching a Baghdad building were members of the Iraq Survey Group, the task force scouring Iraq for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened hearings Tuesday on John D. Negroponte's nomination as America's first ambassador to post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

A Red Cross team visited Saddam Hussein to see his conditions in U.S. custody, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said, but he refused to say where the visit took place. It was the first since the Red Cross visited the ousted Iraqi leader in February.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that Britain has enough troops in Iraq and appeared to rule out sending more immediately despite the withdrawal of Spanish, Honduran and Dominican soldiers. "We keep the question of troops under review," Blair said.

Poland's likely next prime minister said Tuesday that domestic pressure is building to set a timetable for an eventual pullout of its soldiers from Iraq, but he plans no imminent retreat. Poland commands a 9,500-member multinational force in south-central Iraq, including 2,400 of its own troops.

Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov said his country's troops were "not prepared" for the kind of fighting they are doing in Iraq and need "immediate and substantial military backup" from the coalition.

Halliburton Co. said a fourth body found near an April 9 attack on a fuel convoy in Iraq was identified as Tony Johnson, 47, of Riverside, Calif., one of its contract workers. Three other bodies were already identified as Halliburton workers. Two workers are missing.

A defense official in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity said investigators were trying to determine whether the weapons-hunting group hit by the explosion Monday might have been given a false tip intended to lure them into a trap.

The U.S. military has said the Americans were investigating a site where "chemical munitions" were suspected of being produced when the blast went off, killing two troops.

There was no word whether any chemical weapons were found at the site, or whether any precautions against dangerous chemicals had been taken in the neighborhood after the blast.

In Fallujah, Marines pressed ahead with plans to send patrols into the city alongside Iraqi security forces, despite a bloody battle Monday with Sunni insurgents at a mosque. Blue-shirted Iraqi police crept through an abandoned warehouse district, training guns on empty doorways and rooftops as part of U.S. Marine-led preparations for the patrols.

One Marine was killed Monday, and tank fire toppled the mosque's minaret, which commanders said was being used by gunmen. The violence, in which eight Iraqi insurgents were killed, tested the U.S. decision to continue a political track in resolving the Fallujah standoff.

The Najaf fighting was one of the heaviest battles with the militia as U.S. troops try to increase the pressure on gunmen loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. U.S. troops moved into a base that Spanish troops are abandoning, but promised to stay away from the sensitive Shiite shrines at the heart of the southern city.

The first skirmish came in the afternoon, when Shiite militiamen opened fire on a U.S. patrol, and seven insurgents were killed. Hours later, a M1 tank was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades, triggering a heavy battle in which warplanes destroyed an anti-aircraft gun belonging to the militia, and 57 gunmen were killed, Kimmitt said.

The battle lasted several hours. Night video taken by the Associated Press Television News between Najaf and the nearby town of Kufa showed U.S. army helicopters flying low over smoke rising from an area in the distance amid flashes of gunfire.

U.S. authorities have vowed to capture al-Sadr and uproot his militia, the al-Mahdi Army, which launched a bloody uprising at the beginning of April. Al-Mahdi gunmen still dominate the streets of Najaf, Kufa and Karbala.

About 2,000 troops are deployed outside Najaf, but the military is having to tread carefully. Any action that even brings the possibility of harm to the sacred Imam Ali Shrine at its heart could turn the limited al-Sadr revolt into a widespread uprising by Iraq's Shiite majority.

The U.S. soldier was killed and another wounded in an attack on their patrol near the Baghdad Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, a stronghold of al-Sadr's Al-Mahdi Army militia, Kimmitt told reporters.

The death brought to 115 the number of U.S. troops killed in combat in the past 27 days — the same number of Americans killed during the two-month invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein a year ago. At least 714 U.S. troops have died in Iraq.