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Sadr tells militia to surrender shrine to clerics

NAJAF, Iraq - Radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his fighters Thursday to hand control of a revered Najaf shrine to top Shiite religious authorities, hours after U.S. forces bombed militant positions and Iraq's prime minister made a "final call" for the cleric's militia to surrender.

Blasts and gunbattles persisted throughout the day Thursday in the streets of Najaf, where militants bombarded a police station with mortar rounds, killing seven police and injuring 35. At night, at least 30 explosions shook the Old City as a U.S. plane hit targets east of the Imam Ali Shrine.

U.S. forces also battled Sadr's supporters in a Baghdad slum, where militants said five fighters and five civilians were killed. Also, late Thursday, an American warplane bombed targets in the Sunni city of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad.

Insurgents fired back mortars toward a U.S. base. U.S. forces have routinely bombed targets in the city it says are strongholds of Sunni insurgents.

Militants elsewhere in Iraq attacked oil facilities in the north and south, fired mortars at U.S. Embassy offices in the capital, injuring one American, and threatened to kill two hostages, a Turkish worker and a U.S. journalist.

In a speech, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi had warned the radical cleric to disarm his forces and withdraw from the shrine after his government threatened to send an Iraqi force to root them out.

Defying that ultimatum, Sadr sent a telephone text message vowing to seek "martyrdom or victory," and his followers inside the shrine danced and chanted.

Later in the day, a top Sadr aide said the cleric had ordered his militia to relinquish control of the shrine where they have been holed up for two weeks fighting Iraqi and U.S. forces. But in a letter shown by the Arab television station Al-Arabiya, Sadr said he would not disband his Mahdi Army.

Sadr had said he wanted to make sure the shrine was in the custody of religious authorities, though it was unclear if the government would agree to that.

The violence in the holy city between the insurgents and a combined U.S.-Iraqi force has angered many in Iraq's Shiite majority and proven a major challenge to Allawi's fledgling interim government as it tries to build credibility and prove it is not a U.S. puppet.

Any raid to oust militants from the Imam Ali shrine - especially one that damaged the holy site - could spark a far larger Shiite uprising. Government accusations that militants have mined the shrine compound and reports that women and children were inside could further complicate a raid.

Some of those in the compound were "dancing and cheering," a CNN journalist reported from inside the shrine, where she was among journalists escorted there with help from the Iraqi government, the U.S. military and the Mahdi Army.

"They are all very proud to be in here and seem to be very adamant about staying in here," CNN reporter Kianne Sadeq said. "They aren't going anywhere until the fighting is over."

There was no certainty that the latest offer from Sadr to withdraw would be implemented, as both sides appeared to be engaged in brinkmanship.

In Washington, the Bush administration said Sadr needs to match words with deeds. "We have seen many, many times Sadr assume or say he is going to accept certain terms and then it turns out not to be the case," said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

U.S. military medical personnel grossly abused medical ethics at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, helping to design interrogation techniques, turning their backs on abuse by guards, failing to protect the rights of detainees and actively hiding evidence of abuse, a Minnesota bioethicist charges in today's issue of the medical journal Lancet.

Some even went so far as to revive prisoners for further torture and falsify death certificates of prisoners killed during interrogation, according to official documents examined by Steven H. Miles of the University of Minnesota.

The failings of the medical staff are perhaps even more disturbing than the abuses by guards, Miles said Thursday.

"Medical personnel are the first and last bulwark against human rights abuses," he said. "It is up to physicians and medics to intervene" to protect prisoners. Not only did they not intervene at Abu Ghraib, but they also actively participated in the abuse, he said.

Their "offenses do not merely fall short of medical ideals; some constitute grave breaches of international or U.S. law," Miles wrote.

Information from the Los Angeles Times was used in this report.