New abuse images pile pressure on US in Iraq

Fresh images including graphic video of US soldiers beating and humiliating Iraqis rocked the US mission in Iraq again yesterday, days before President George W. Bush lays out his plan to hand back power to Iraqis.

Some prisoners said troops forced them to insult Islam. US aircraft with devastating firepower pounded Shi'ite militia in the holy city of Kerbala, killing an unknown number, in a bid to crush insurgents whose demands for Americans to go are gaining support among Iraqis frustrated with the occupation.

Marking a growing rift between Washington and its closest Iraqi allies, the Iraq Governing Council roundly condemned the US authority that appointed them for a raid by US troops and Iraqi police on the offices of Council member Ahmad Chalabi.

Mr Bush, who is campaigning for re-election in November, will spell out in a speech on Monday a "clear strategy" for the process under which Washington will hand over power, with some limitations, to what it hopes will be a pro-American Iraqi government on June 30. Elections are due in the new year.

The US military said it released 454 more detainees from Abu Ghraib prison, part of a programme to slash inmate numbers.

But new pictures from the jail published by the Washington Post, including a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit cowering before a dog and an American soldier watching a tottering naked man covered in what looks like excrement, can only harden ill will.

In one video, the first moving images to emerge three weeks after the first similar images provoked Arab outrage at the United States, a US soldier punches a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, once Saddam Hussein's torture centre outside Baghdad.

Thirteen sworn statements by detainees seen by the paper added an overtly anti-Muslim dimension. Some said they were forced to renounce their religion, eat pork and drink alcohol.

"Because they started to hit my broken leg, I curse my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus I am alive," one said.

Soldier Jeremy Sivits was sentenced to a year in jail and thrown out of the army for abusing prisoners at a court martial in Baghdad on Wednesday. He is expected to testify against some six fellow soldiers, most of them charged with graver crimes.

But Mr Bush's efforts to limit the damage to this single case have been hampered by accusations of more widespread abuse.

The US military said it was investigating accounts that an air strike on a desert hamlet on Wednesday killed not 40 or so foreign guerillas, as US officers say, but a wedding party.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman, said four to six women may have died in the incident.

The top UN human rights official, Bertand Ramcharan, condemned the attack, however, whatever the reasons for it:

"The acting United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has expressed shock over the deaths of some 40 civilians at a wedding party in Iraq near the Syrian border," his office said in a statement. "Even if there are security-related concerns, there can be no licence to commit carnage."

Despite pressure on his Mehdi Army fighters in Kerbala that included the use of a devastating AC-130 airborne gunship, militant Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr slipped from his refuge among the shrines of nearby Najaf to deliver a defiant sermon.

"Don't let my death end your resistance. Continue and God will give you victory," al-Sadr told worshippers at Kufa mosque, as his fighters skirmished with American soldiers nearby.

The US military said troops clashed with a high-speed car convoy between Kufa and Najaf, killing a driver. But it was unclear if they had come close to snaring al-Sadr's motorcade.

Among those killed during hours of heavy fighting in Kerbala was an Iraqi working for Arab television channel Al Jazeera.