Shiite cleric talks may end standoff

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A powerful delegation of Shiite clerics met with Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf on Monday, beginning negotiations that appeared to offer the best hope yet of resolving the standoff between the U.S. military and al-Sadr, the cleric whose followers threw much of central and southern Iraq into anarchy over the past week.

Shiite clerics had largely stayed silent while al-Sadr's followers briefly seized control of several southern Iraqi cities, but their influence could be a crucial check on al-Sadr. The delegation included men with ties to Iraq's most powerful Shiite leaders, including the son of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Although U.S. commanders said last week that they planned to "kill or capture" al-Sadr, officials have conceded privately that any raid into Najaf, a city sacred to Iraq's majority Shiite population, would risk provoking more anti-American violence.

Other developments on Monday pointed toward a tentative easing of a confrontation that, with the U.S. siege of the city of Fallujah, has presented the U.S. hierarchy in Iraq with its biggest challenge since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

As late as Sunday evening, many people in Baghdad were locking their doors and preparing evacuation routes in case al-Sadr attempted to attack the capital to try to foil U.S. attempts to seize him.

On Monday, for the first time in a week, life in the capital returned to something like normal, with many businesses reopening and traffic back on streets that had been almost deserted. U.S. officers said that after a week in which several hundred insurgents had been shot dead in the capital and outlying areas, a drop in attacks had set in late on Sunday, and an unstable situation had begun to improve.

In Najaf, the first sign of easing tensions came with the withdrawal of hundreds of al-Sadr militiamen from police stations they overran in the first hours of the insurrection a week ago on Sunday. An Agence France-Presse report quoted the chief of the American-trained police force in the city -- most of whom left their posts or joined the militiamen when the fighting started -- as saying U.S. forces and al-Sadr had reached an agreement for the police to resume control of the city.

U.S. commanders denied there had been any deal and said al-Sadr's men continued to roam the city, in effective control.

In Najaf, residents identifying themselves as "intellectuals" distributed leaflets that effectively endorsed the U.S. case against al-Sadr. "We don't want anyone, whoever he is, to surround himself with armed bodyguards, and return us to an era of slavery for the Iraqi people," the leaflets said.

The possibility of a breakthrough in Najaf came as a parallel effort continued to avoid further bloodshed at Fallujah, which has been encircled by U.S. Marines seeking to end its role as a base for Sunni insurgents. The Marines have also been set the task of capturing the killers of four American security guards under contract to the military who were ambushed, shot and mutilated, then hanged from a bridge, as they drove through the city two weeks ago

U.S. commanders said on Monday that "the situation in Fallujah remains calm" on the fourth day of a cease-fire Marines declared to allow Iraqi intermediaries to enter the city for talks, and to allow its 200,000 residents to bury their dead, tend to their wounded and acquire urgently needed supplies of food and medicines across the American siege lines.

The surge of kidnappings that have become, in a few days, one of the most threatening features of the conflict, continued on Monday. Al-Jazeera television, the Arab satellite channel, said Monday that nine Russians had been seized on the western outskirts of Baghdad, on top of at least 30 other foreigners taken hostage in the area. The Russians' capture could not be confirmed.

Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the U.S. field commander in Iraq, said in a teleconference with Pentagon reporters on Monday that two U.S. soldiers were listed as missing, as well as seven employees of Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR, a subsidiary of the Houston-based oilfield services company Halliburton.

The New China News Agency announced on Monday that seven Chinese citizens taken hostage on the weekend, had been released. But Japanese diplomats said there was no word on the fate of three Japanese who were seized last week and threatened with execution if Japan did not withdraw from Iraq.

Other new additions to the list included two Czech television journalists who disappeared on Sunday.

A Romanian private security guard caught in an ambush in the Abu Ghraib area on Sunday was killed, the Romanian foreign ministry said.

The talks with al-Sadr brought together several figures from the supreme clerical establishment for the world's Shiites, based in Najaf. The delegation's leader was Mohammad Ridha, a son of al- Sistani, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq, and included Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sayed al-Hakim, whose authority is considered almost on a par with al-Sistani's.

The decision of the prominent clerics to intervene was the result of days of secret contacts, and a vindication, U.S. officials said, of months of assiduous U.S. courtesy toward al-Sistani. The aging cleric has been an increasingly shrill champion of Shiite rights in Iraq but at the same time a restraining influence through his emphasis on the importance of settling the country's web of ethnic, religious and political rivalries peacefully.

Neither side offered any details of the talks. Nor was it clear what concessions, if any, the delegation may have offered al-Sadr as the price of ending his insurrection, or even whether the U.S. occupation authority had indicated a willingness to cut a deal with him.

U.S. officials gave mixed signals suggesting they were hoping that tough warnings that they were after al-Sadr, coupled with the increasing military threat outside Najaf, might tip the balance in the talks. Since last week, the American occupation authority has said it planned to arrest al-Sadr in the murder of a grand ayatollah last April 10.

The clearest hint came in the remarks of Gen. John P. Abizaid, the head of Central Command, who appeared in a teleconference call linking the U.S. military headquarters in Baghdad with reporters at the Pentagon and said, with emphasis, that "the mission of the U.S. forces is to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr." But at another point, he said there would "probably end up being a uniquely Iraqi solution" to the effort to bring al-Sadr to justice.

The three Marines killed in the Fallujah fighting on Sunday, along with and three other U.S. troops whose combat deaths were announced on Monday, pushed the number of U.S. troops killed in a week of fighting to "about 70," according to Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief spokesman for the U.S. command in Baghdad.

The Department of Defense released the names of 60 Americans who died in the conflict last week. Previously, the most Americans to have died in one week was 50, during the week of March 23-29, 2003, at the war's beginning.

Iraqi casualties in the fighting, estimated by Kimmitt as "somewhere about 10 times" the number of American dead, were also by far the highest of any week of the insurgency.

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