IRAQ: An Iraqi peace delegation urged a radical Shia cleric yesterday to call off his uprising in the city of Najaf where US troops pounded militia positions near the country's holiest Islamic sites.
Braving US bombardment and militia sniper fire, the group of eight political and religious leaders drove to the office of cleric Mr Moqtada al-Sadr, not far from the Imam Ali Mosque where the firebrand and his Mehdi Army are holed up.
They met Mr al-Sadr's top aides and then waited at the shrine for a meeting with him as fighting raged in a nearby ancient cemetery, witnesses said.
However, Mr al-Sadr refused to meet the delegation.
One of Mr al- Sadr's aides told reporters accompanying the delegation that he refused to meet them "because of continued aggression by the Americans".
The delegation flew in on US Black Hawk helicopters from a meeting in Baghdad where 1,300 delegates sought to select an interim national assembly to oversee the government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.
Heated debates over Najaf and selecting members to the assembly have dominated the unprecedented gathering in Baghdad, a step on Iraq's tortured road to democracy.
The conference, scheduled to end yesterday, was extended to today after many delegates opposed a list of 81 candidates presented to the meeting by the pro-US interim government, conference chairman Fouad Massoum said.
The remaining 19 members will come from the Governing Council, a 25-member body appointed by the US-led occupation before the June handover of power.
"If we stay here longer you will not be able to go home," Massoum said, referring to the shaky security situation.
Mr Allawi needs to quell the Shia rebellion that has hit eight central and southern cities and undermined his authority just seven weeks after he took over from US-led occupiers.
But he is walking a dangerous tightrope, with passions in the majority Shia country at boiling point over US troops fighting near holy sites in Najaf.
In Baghdad, insurgents fired a shell into a busy street, killing at least seven people including two children. The attack wounded 42 people, leaving pools of blood on pavements.
Witnesses said British troops battled Shia militiamen in the oil port city of Basra as darkness fell and at least one militiaman was killed. One British soldier was killed and there were other injuries during the conflict a British army spokesman said tonight.
Leaders at the national conference on Monday agreed to send the team to Najaf after Mr al-Sadr's weekend peace talks with the government collapsed and the cleric vowed to fight to the death.
"This is a friendly mission to convey the message of the national conference," delegation head Sheikh Hussein al-Sadr, a relative but political opponent of the cleric, said at a US military camp on the outskirts of Najaf. They then drove to Mr al-Sadr's office with a police escort.
"We want to change the Mehdi army into a political organisation and to evacuate the Imam Ali shrine with the promise not to legally pursue those taking shelter there. This is what the government and all Iraqis want."
As the delegation waited at the camp to be driven in civilian cars to the shrine, US troops fired some 20 artillery rounds at militia positions in the city.
US warplanes dropped flares while tanks and armoured vehicles fired rounds at gunmen in the city centre. The militia responded with rocket-propelled grenades.
A Reuters photographer was wounded in the leg while covering the fighting.
The delegation earlier put off travelling by road to the southern city after insurgents threatened to ambush them.
Aides to the cleric, who is the icon of Iraq's downtrodden Shia masses, have said he welcomed the idea of sending the team but have not said whether he would meet the mission.
Clashes also erupted overnight between the militia and US forces in a poor Shia suburb in Baghdad called Sadr City. - (Reuters)