NAJAF, July 28: One of Iraq’s most influential Shia leaders rejected on Friday the use of US forces to stabilise Iraq’s security situation, as the Pentagon announced an increase in troop numbers.

Abdel Aziz Hakim told a rally in Najaf that Iraqis should handle their own security, despite the mounting death toll in Baghdad.

The Pentagon extended the tours of about 3,500 US troops in Iraq for 120 days on Thursday, dashing hopes of US force cuts this year in the face of surging sectarian violence.

The Pentagon also identified army and marine units totalling about 25,000 troops that have been scheduled to deploy to Iraq late this year and early next, enough to maintain the US force at about 130,000 troops for a year.

Mr Hakim, whose party — the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) — is one of the largest in Mr Maliki’s coalition government, told a chanting crowd of thousands that Iraqis should take matters into their own hands.

“We must activate the project of popular committees to secure the neighbourhoods,” he said, echoing calls from other Shiite leaders for local militias to protect their districts from Iraq’s roving death squads.

“The security file should be handed over to Iraqi forces and no one should interfere with it,” he told supporters in Najaf. “The interference in the work of Iraqi security forces prevents them from catching terrorists.”

Mr Hakim’s intervention reflects a deepening divide in perceptions of Iraq’s security problems among the country’s political leaders.

“Those who kill the Iraqis are the takfirists (Sunni extremists), Saddamists, and Baathists,” he said, referring to members of Saddam’s former ruling party. “Any talk about anything else is directing the war away from its focus.”

Mahmud Mahdi al-Sumaidaie, a member of the hardline Sunni Muslim Scholars Association, and imam of the Umm al-Qura mosque preferred to lay the blame for the security situation on US forces.

“The US occupiers are responsible for what is going on with the violence and destruction — they are the ones controlling the security file,” he said in his Friday sermon.

NO HOPE OF REDUCTION: The Pentagon move indicated that US commanders have effectively given up hopes for even a gradual reduction in the US force this year on account of a bitter insurgency and spiralling sectarian violence.

It boosted the size of the US force from 14 brigades to 15 brigades, and from 127,000 troops to at least 130,000.—AFP