Iraq

Iranian-trained troops control town

MAJAR AL-KABIR, Iraq - The Badr brigade, a militia group whose members trained in Iran while Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, controls this town of 50,000 people where six British soldiers and four Iraqis were killed in a firefight this week, residents said Thursday.

Officials in Washington have said that U.S. intelligence reports indicate that Badr forces have set up headquarters and tried to recruit supporters in towns in southern Iraq, and that fighters who have returned to Iraq from Iran have shed their uniforms and melted into civilian populations.

In Majar al-Kabir, less than 50 miles west of the Iranian border, the militia is armed and occupies the police compound where the soldiers, members of the British Royal Military Police, were killed Tuesday.

Two of about eight armed men in the police compound Thursday said they had recently come from Iran. Hussein Ashayer, 30, said he had spent five years there, sneaking into Iraq several times on unspecified missions.

WASHINGTON - The Republican-controlled House defeated two amendments Thursday by Democrats to broaden congressional investigations into the Bush administration's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and connections with the al-Qaida terrorist network.

The votes came as the House debated a bill authorizing more than $37-billion to finance U.S. intelligence operations next year.

The House defeated, 239 to 185, an amendment by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, to require the comptroller general to look into the sharing of U.S. intelligence with U.N. weapons inspectors before the war. Jackson Lee said questions about whether the Bush administration shared all relevant intelligence about weapons sites with the U.N. inspections teams needed to be answered because President Bush had said "inspections had failed" and that Iraq's weapons "posed such a dire, imminent threat to the United States that we had no choice but to go to war."

The house also defeated, 347 to 76, an amendment by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, that would have authorized the CIA inspector general to audit telephone and electronic communications between the CIA and Vice President Cheney's office relating to weapons of mass destruction.

WASHINGTON - The White House said Thursday that the discovery of documents and parts from Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons efforts supported the Bush administration's contention that Saddam Hussein's government had concealed weapons programs.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency interpreted the find as proof that Iraq's nuclear weapons effort had never been revived.

Starting in May, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist, Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, provided parts and documents to CIA officers in Baghdad, U.S. officials said.

He said he kept them buried in his backyard, on the orders of Hussein's government, as "part of a high-level plan to reconstitute the nuclear weapons program once sanctions were ended," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Iraq's former information minister, who gained notoriety during the war for wildly implausible claims of victory, surfaced Thursday and said he was given bad information by his sources.

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf had denied that U.S. tanks were in Baghdad even as television pictures showed them in the capital. "There is no presence of American infidels in the city of Baghdad," al-Sahhaf asserted outside the Palestine Hotel on April 7. Baghdad fell April 9.

Al-Sahhaf, who dropped from sight, surfaced with interviews with the Al-Arabiya satellite network and Abu Dhabi television.

He told Al-Arabiya he got his information, he said: "From authentic sources."

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