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Thousands of Shiites protest in IraqNew council fails to appoint president
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Thousands of Iraqi Shiite demonstrators staged protests Saturday in Baghdad after reports that U.S. troops surrounded the house of a Shiite cleric a day after he criticized a U.S.-appointed governing council for Iraq and said he was forming an army. About 3,000 to 4,000 people marched to coalition headquarters in Baghdad after reports that U.S. armored personnel carriers briefly surrounded the house of Moqtada al Sadr, a 29-year-old cleric in the holy city Najaf. There were also protests in Najaf, the spiritual center for the world's Shiites. In a sermon during Friday prayers, Sadr called the governing council -- appointed by U.S. administrator for Iraq L. Paul Bremer -- an assembly of "nonbelievers," according to The Associated Press. Sadr also said he was raising an army and called for volunteers. A coalition spokesman would not comment on the demonstrations or the report the cleric's house was surrounded by U.S. troops, but he said that the creation of any military force in Iraq has to be under the auspices of the government. "There can only be one army," the coalition spokesman said. "Nobody can just start an army." The United States opened army recruitment centers in Iraq Saturday to replace the force that was crushed during the Iraqi war. Former army officers can join if they were below the rank of lieutenant colonel during Saddam Hussein's regime. Stopping short of saying that the United States should leave Iraq, Sadr insisted it is up to the Iraqis to choose their leader. "We are neither for Saddam nor for the Americans," he said. Sadr's popularity among Iraqi Shiites stems in great part from reputation and influence of his father, Ayatollah Mohamed Baqr al Sadr, who is believed to have been assassinated by Saddam. During a speech Saturday, Sadr urged President Bush to apologize for the troop deployment around his house. The cleric also rallied demonstrators to protest the formation of the new Iraqi governing council, the majority of whom are Shiite Muslim. According to the AP, the majority of the Shiite members are secular figures or moderate clerics. In its first week, the U.S.-appointed body failed to choose a president, abandoning that mission in favor of a weak, three-man rotating leadership, the AP reported. After it was announced last Sunday, the council said its first order of business was the election of a president. U.S. soldier killed in BaghdadA U.S. soldier guarding a bank in Baghdad died Saturday from wounds suffered when his unit was ambushed by attackers firing small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, according to U.S. Central Command and military officials. The attack happened around 1:30 a.m. (4:30 p.m. Friday ET) in the Abu Ghreib district Central Command said. The soldier, from the 1st Armored Division, was evacuated to a nearby medical aid station where he died. Later in the morning -- at about 10:45 a.m. -- four more soldiers from the 1st Armored Division were wounded when their vehicle hit what the military called "an improvised explosive device" in Baghdad's al-Rashid neighborhood. The four soldiers were evacuated to a local military hospital. Another improvised explosive device killed a 3rd Infantry Division soldier Friday west of Baghdad near Fallujah, a city that has been a center of anti-U.S. attacks and other activities. The Pentagon identified him as Spc. Joel L. Bertoldie, 20, of Independence, Missouri. Since Bush declared the end of major combat operations May 1, 90 U.S. soldiers have died -- 24 of those in July alone and 34 in hostile action. In all, 227 members of the U.S. military been killed in the war with Iraq, 149 of them from hostile fire. The killings come at a time of growing concern at home over the rising death toll and uncertainty about how long U.S. troops will have to stay. Diplomatic sources quoted by Reuters said the United States might turn to the United Nations to try to persuade countries to send soldiers or share costs, running at around $4 billion a month. According to the Reuters report, the State Department said Washington was open to giving the United Nations a bigger role in Iraq. "We're open to this prospect. We're indeed talking about it with other people, but at this point I can't draw to a conclusion," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. Other developments• The military will announce a rotation plan for U.S. troops in Iraq sometime next week, Pentagon sources said. Sources said the plan would identify which troops would replace the remainder of the battle-weary 3rd Infantry Division and that the replacements would be "active duty Army troops." The division was the first to reach Baghdad and has had many casualties. • The White House has released portions of the classified National Intelligence Estimate in attempt to show why speechwriters included a now-disputed line in Bush's State of the Union address relating to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The document concluded there was "compelling evidence" Saddam was trying to restart his nuclear program, but also included State Department concerns about the accuracy of intelligence that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa. (Full story) • Police Saturday confirmed that a body found north of London is that of the missing British scientist David Kelly, found dead of a slashed wrist near his home. Kelly, 59, a microbiologist and former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, had been named by the British government as a possible source for a BBC report that the prime minister's office "sexed up" a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He had been missing since Thursday afternoon. (Full story) Correspondents Dana Bash, Rym Brahimi, Jonathan Karl, Jamie McIntyre, Nic Robertson and Barbara Starr contributed to this report.
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