IRAQ: Civilian officials working for the US-led authority in Iraq evacuated their office in the southern city of Nassiriya yesterday after coming under attack from gunmen loyal to a rebel Shia cleric.
In attacks around Baghdad, two Iraqi women who work on US bases and a driver died when the bus they were travelling in was attacked, and an Iraqi woman working as a translator was killed when gunmen broke into her house south of Baghdad.
Militia fighters led by Sheikh Moqtada al-Sadr, a hardline Shia cleric, are engaged in battle with coalition troops in towns across southern Iraq.
Yesterday the gunmen fought with Italian soldiers on a bridge crossing the Euphrates in Nassiriya. At least two of Sheikh al-Sadr's gunmen were killed and 20 injured. Six Italian soldiers were injured.
The latest fighting in Nassiriya began on Friday when militia fighters laid siege to the office of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Civilian officials at the CPA moved to a military base outside the city yesterday. Only two staff remained behind.
On Friday British troops shot dead at least 21 Iraqis after a series of ambushes laid by Sheikh al-Sadr's gunmen in Amara, in southeastern Iraq.
They were buried yesterday at Najaf, the holy Shia city.
In Najaf, aides of Sheikh al-Sadr accused British troops of murdering prisoners and mutilating their bodies. A British defence ministry spokesman dismissed the accusations of maltreatment.
US tanks dominated the streets of Kerbala yesterday, exchanging fire from dawn with fighters who attacked with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.
One guerrilla was killed and three wounded, doctors said.
A US soldier was killed yesterday by a roadside bomb in the Baghdad area.
The fighting came as one of Washington's closest Iraqi allies, Governing Council member Mr Ahman Chalabi, sharply criticised the military assault on Shia insurgents in the south, especially in two holy cities.
He said 1,000 people may have died in six weeks of fighting.
The sexual humiliations US guards meted out to detainees in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib and captured on film have undermined US credibility among Iraqis and other Arabs and put its allies in difficulty with their own electorates just as Washington is seeking broader UN involvement in Iraq.
Mr Chalabi, once the voice of exiled Iraqis opposed to Saddam Hussein and himself a Shi'ite, sharply criticised US tactics.
He said Washington's demands that Sheikh al-Sadr let himself be arrested for murder was complicating Iraqi efforts to resolve the crisis.
"Enforcing Iraqi law should not be a US military objective," Mr Chalabi said.
"I wonder why the price for enforcing an arrest warrant should be more than 1,000 Iraqi lives?"
Meanwhile, Italian Foreign Minister Mr Franco Frattini, whose government faces criticism at home for deploying the third biggest foreign force in Iraq, told Washington it must mete out "severe and public" punishment for crimes that have dominated Italian media.
The first of seven US soldiers charged faces a court martial in Baghdad on Wednesday - the day Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi meets President Bush to discuss progress in Iraq.
The fighting yesterday in Nassiriya in which six Italian soldiers were wounded followed US assaults on the main bases of Sheikh al-Sadr loyalists in the Shi'ite holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala.
"We have asked the Americans to avoid frontal attacks on Iraqi holy cities and to hand over military control of these cities to Iraqi forces," Mr Frattini wrote in a newspaper.
The Italian official running the administration in Nassiriya, Ms Barbara Contini, was in a convoy which came under fire.
Meanwhile, Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera aired a tape yesterday showing what it said were two Russian hostages seized in Iraq last week by a group calling itself the Army of the Victorious Sect. The group called on coalition countries to withdraw their citizens "before it was too late".
"The kidnappers said they were the Russians who work in a power plant in al-Dora, south of Baghdad," Al Jazeera said. Two Russians were seized on May 10th. Their employer, Interenergoservis, is involved in a power plant project just outside Baghdad.