IRAQ: Iraq's ruling parties yesterday demanded US forces cede control of security as the government launched an inquiry into a raid on a Shia mosque that ministers said saw "cold blooded" killings by US-led troops.
As Shia militiamen fulminated over Sunday's deaths of 20 or more people in Baghdad, an al Qaeda-led group said it carried out one of the bloodiest Sunni insurgent attacks in months. A suicide bomber killed 40 Iraqi army recruits in northern Iraq.
The Iraqi defence ministry said a suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt also wounded 30 at a base near Mosul.
After a confusing 24 hours following the bloodshed around Baghdad's Mustafa mosque in which the US military restricted itself to issuing one somewhat opaque statement, US officials distanced themselves from the operation, calling it Iraqi-led.
Officials in Baghdad appeared to wait for input from Washington, underlining the sensitivity of the confrontation between Iraq's Iranian-linked Shia Islamist leaders and the US forces at a time when Washington is pressing them to forge a unity government with minority Sunnis to avert civil war.
A day later, three broad versions of the events that led to the deaths of some 20 - or possibly more - people persisted.
Iraq's security minister accused US and Iraqi forces of killing 37 unarmed civilians in the mosque after tying them up.
Residents and police, who put the death toll among the troops' opponents at around 20, spoke of a fierce battle between the soldiers and gunmen from the Mehdi army militia of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose followers ran the mosque.
And US officials, finally confirming they were describing the same incident, stuck by a statement saying Iraqi special forces, advised by US troops, killed 16 "insurgents" who fired on them first. They also insisted no troops entered any mosque and had freed an Iraqi being held prisoner.
Several Iraqi officials said the raid may have targeted a site used by militiamen to hold illegal courts and executions, part of efforts to impose Islamic law in parts of Baghdad.
One source of confusion over the site may be that the mosque in question, close to Sadr's Sadr City stronghold in northeast Baghdad, was not a traditional religious building but a compound of former Baath party offices converted by Sadr followers.
A State Department official said in Washington: "This was an Iraqi planned and led operation and US forces were only in an advisory capacity." While US officials refused to acknowledge that the targets of the operation were Shias, and the sectarian affiliations of the Iraqi troops involved was unclear, the State Department official said the incident underlined what he called the need for Iraq's security forces to be free of sectarian bias.
One thing was certain: Shia leaders were up in arms against the US forces who effectively brought them to power by overthrowing Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baathist regime.
"The Alliance calls for a rapid restoration of [ control of] security matters to the Iraqi government," Jawad al-Maliki, a senior spokesman of the Shia Islamist Alliance and ally of prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, told a news conference.
The US handed over formal sovereignty in 2004 but 133,000 troops in the country give it the main say in security.
Government-run television repeated lengthy footage of the bodies of men in civilian clothes with no weapons in sight.
Baghdad provincial governor Hussein al-Tahan said he would halt all co-operation with US forces.
Aides to Sadr denied any Mehdi army fighters were present. But witnesses spoke of a lengthy gun battle: "The shooting lasted for more than an hour," shopkeeper Ali Abdul Jabbar said.
President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said: "We have to know the truth about what happened."