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Iraq

Ukraine begins phased withdrawal of its troops

By wire services
Published March 13, 2005

BAGHDAD - Ukraine withdrew 150 servicemen from Iraq on Saturday, beginning a gradual pullout, as Shiite and Kurdish politicians refined plans to form a coalition government that officials said includes an agreement not to turn the country into an Islamic state.

In Mosul, gunmen killed three policemen and wounded a fourth at a funeral procession, the second time in as many days that mourners have been targeted in that northern city.

It was unclear if the mourners were Shiites, but the police officers were participating in a procession for a colleague's wife and two children who died in a roadside bomb attack a day earlier, police Officer Ammar Hussein said.

Insurgents led by Sunni Arabs, a minority that was dominant under Saddam Hussein, are targeting Shiite funeral processions and ceremonies in an apparent campaign to spark a sectarian war.

The Ukrainian company that was based near Suwayrah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, left Iraq and was expected to return home by Tuesday, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.

This month, President Viktor Yushchenko and top defense officials ordered a phased withdrawal of Ukraine's 1,650-strong contingent from the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Ukraine has lost 17 soldiers in Iraq, and the deployment is deeply unpopular among people in the former Soviet republic.

Bulgarian military investigators, meanwhile, said U.S. troops who killed a Bulgarian soldier had opened fire without warning but did not "deliberately" kill Pvt. Gardi Gardev on March 4.

In political developments, the country's main Shiite and Kurdish coalitions were putting the finishing touches on an agreement they hope to sign Monday forming a coalition government. Any U.S. exit strategy hinges on having a new government organize Iraq's army and police to take over responsibility for security.

A senior member of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, Ahmad Chalabi, traveled late Friday to Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad, for talks with Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader who is slated to become Iraq's next president.

The Kurds have agreed that conservative Islamic Dawa party leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari will be Iraq's prime minister.

"There is discussion and there is an agreement on the basic principles. But there is not final agreement on all the details. This visit was on invitation by Talabani to Chalabi. The atmosphere was positive," Ali al-Faisal said.

Kurds and alliance officials said both sides agreed that Iraq would not become an Islamic state, a desire also expressed by the country's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party, said the Kurds would oppose any attempt to turn Iraq into an Islamic state.

"I think the Shiites well understand that implementing an Islamic government . . . will bring a lot of problems," Barzani said. "We have an alliance with the Shiites. We were both oppressed, and we both struggled against the old regime, but if they insist on having a religious government, we will oppose them."

An alliance member, Ali al-Dabagh, said there were no plans to turn Iraq into a religious state or a secular one.

In other developments:

The U.S. military said it had launched an investigation into the "possible mistreatment" by soldiers of two Iraqi civilians detained by American troops last month. The civilians received minor injuries while being transported to a detention facility during an operation Feb. 27, the military said. The six soldiers being investigated were serving under the command of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

Insurgents blew up two oil pipelines, one near Samarra and the other in the area near Riyadh, a town close to Kirkuk.

NEW YORK - Egypt secretly supplied crucial technology and expert manpower to the chemical weapons program of Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, U.S. arms investigators have found.

The CIA's Iraq Survey Group says Egyptian specialists helped the Iraqis make "technological leaps" on poison gas at the height of the Iran-Iraq War, when Baghdad used nerve agents to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers and Iranian and Iraqi civilians.

The U.S. report is the most authoritative and detailed since such collaboration between the Arab nations was first rumored in the late 1980s.

The Cairo government rejected those earlier allegations, and Egypt's Washington embassy reiterated that denial when asked about the CIA report. But U.N. arms inspectors who scoured Iraq's files and facilities in the 1990s corroborated the U.S. finding.

[Last modified March 13, 2005, 00:24:03]