Leave Iraq, Sadr tells "Antichrist" Bush

The powerful Iraqi cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr called President George W. Bush the Antichrist yesterday and urged him to heed calls by the opposition Democrats to withdraw from the chaos of Iraq.

In fresh violence yesterday, 14 people were killed and 39 others were wounded in a suicide car bombing in the holy Shi'ite city of Kerbala south of Baghdad, a hospital said. A Reuters witness said he saw tens of casualties. Sadr, whose ministers quit Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government this month, renewed his demand for a US pullout a day after Bush pledged to veto legislation that would require US troops to begin leaving Iraq by October 1.

Calling Bush "the greatest evil", Sadr said in a letter read out by a Sadrist MP in parliament that an eventual US pullout would be a "victory for the Iraqi people".

Maliki, under pressure from his Washington supporters to pass key power-sharing agreements to reconcile Iraq's warring communities, met a Democrat-led Congressional delegation in Baghdad yesterday.

A statement from Maliki's office quoted him as telling the delegation that his government is committed "to building its armed forces and taking over the security portfolio all over Iraq in the quickest time". Bush has refused to set any timetable for a withdrawal, calling it a "surrender date". More than 3,300 US troops have been killed in the increasingly unpopular war since the invasion in 2003.

In Awja, the small town north of Baghdad where Saddam was born, young children gathered with men and women yesterday to celebrate the birthday of the once-feared dictator, who was executed on December 30 for crimes against humanity.

Four years after Saddam's ouster, Iraq has been riven by sectarian violence between majority Shi'ites and once-dominant Sunni Arabs that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and pitched the country close to all-out sectarian civil war.