BAGHDAD, Oct 13: Prime Minister Iyad Allawi threatened on Wednesday a military assault on Fallujah if the guerilla bastion does not surrender Iraq's most wanted man Abu Mussab al Zarqawi , while Baghdad pleaded for aid at an international donor conference in Tokyo.
Emboldened by recent joint US-Iraq military operations against guerillas and the ongoing disarmament of Shia militiamen in Baghdad, Mr Allawi said it was high time for Fallujah to return to government control before elections in January.
"We have asked Fallujah residents to turn over Zarqawi and his group. If they don't do it, we are ready for major operations in Fallujah," Mr Allawi told Iraq's 100-member interim parliament.
The government is hoping weeks of talks with a delegation of elders and leaders from the western town will bear fruit and avert a showdown. As Mr Allawi spoke, Zarqawi's Tawhid wal Jihad group posted a video on the Internet of the purported beheading of two members of Iraq's new intelligence service whom it had kidnapped.
The authenticity of the recording could not be independently verified. The group with alleged links to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network is accused of some of the deadliest car bombings and a string of kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq.
6 US TROOPS KILLED: Anti-US attacks continued in Iraq, with six US soldiers killed in three separate bombings after the army struck guerilla positions in Fallujah and Ramadi on Tuesday, killing 11 people.
In the latest attacks, two US soldiers were killed and five wounded in a suicide car bomb attack against their convoy in the northern city of Mosul on Wednesday.
A third soldier died in a blast in Baghdad. The killings followed the death of three soldiers in a bomb attack the previous day. The attacks raised the number of US troops killed in Iraq to 1,075.
MASS GRAVE: Further evidence that could be used against former president Saddam Hussein has been uncovered in northern Iraq, where investigators completed the first full excavation of a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of Kurds, mainly women and children. Among the dead are pregnant women, even a young boy still clutching his ball, whose bodies were ploughed into their earthen tombs by bulldozers.
RAMADI FIGHTING: Fresh clashes between guerillas and US soldiers left six Iraqis dead and 33 wounded in Ramadi, hospital sources said.
The fighting followed Tuesday's sweep by US marines and Iraqi forces of at least seven mosques in Ramadi, sparking firefights in which two Iraqis were killed.
In Baghdad, radical leader Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army militiamen lined up outside police stations to sell weapons to police on the third day of a five-day period for the movement to disarm in the Sadr City slum.
Mr Allawi said on Wednesday the government would honour its promise to grant amnesty to some of the movement's members and release a number of them from prison if the militia kept its end of the deal to lay down weapons once and for all and participate in the political process. -AFP
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