UR (Iraq), April 15: The search for a new Iraqi leadership began on Tuesday with US officials meeting opposition leaders, but tensions flared as 12 people were killed in the northern city of Mosul after a firefight involving US troops.
The firefight broke out as a newly-appointed governor was making a speech which enraged listeners who said it was too pro-US.
A doctor at a hospital said 12 people had been killed and 60 wounded in the shooting.
Witnesses said US troops fired into the crowd after it became increasingly hostile towards the new governor, Mashaan al Juburi.
“They (the soldiers) climbed on top of the building and first fired at a building near the crowd, with the glass falling on the civilians. People started to throw stones, then the Americans fired at them,” said Ayad Hassun. “Dozens of people fell,” he said, his own shirt stained with blood.
Ambulances ferried wounded people to hospital, while a US aircraft flew over the city at low altitude. US troops guarding the governor said they had opened fire after shooting started from an opposite roof.
At US Central Command in Qatar, Navy Commander Charles Owens said: “We’re investigating, all we can say now is that we did not shoot into a crowd.”
MEETING, PROTEST: Iraqi opposition leaders pledged on Tuesday to work for a democratic Iraq and to hold more talks in 10 days after a US-sponsored meeting marred by protests over the nation’s future.
The United States gathered around 80 exiles, opposition figures and tribal and religious leaders in the historic town of Ur for the first in a series of meetings to lay the groundwork for a democratic government in Baghdad.
But a crowd of around 20,000, mostly Shias, rallied in the nearby city of Nasiriyah to protest US influence in shaping a post-Saddam Iraq, underscoring the pitfalls facing Washington’s effort to “remake” the country.
The meeting released a 13-point statement vowing democracy would be brought to the nation and that the future government would be non-sectarian, based on the rule of law and chosen by Iraqis themselves.
The special White House envoy to the Iraqi opposition, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the meeting that the United States had “no intention of ruling Iraq”.
“We want you to establish your own democratic system based on Iraqi traditions and values,” he said.
Jay Garner, the retired US general named by Washington to lead an interim administration in Iraq, asked: “What better place than the birthplace of civilization could you have for the beginning of a free Iraq?”
It remained unclear how long it would take to get an Iraqi government in place, amid internal divisions in the nation’s fractious ethnic, tribal and religious makeup, and widespread distrust over any potential US-imposed government.
Nasiriyah witnessed a tense standoff as demonstrators unleashed their wrath over Ahmad Chalabi, who has had Pentagon backing as a future Iraqi leader, but is not seen as having broad popular support.
Mr Chalabi did not attend the meeting, but sent a delegate to represent his umbrella Iraqi National Congress.
The largest Shia group declined to attend the meeting and blasted US interference in the country’s future.
“We refuse to put ourselves under the thumb of the Americans or any other country because that is not in the Iraqis’ interests,” Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a top official of the Iran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said on Monday.
One of the delegates dropped to his knees and kissed his native soil after years of exile before the meeting got under way. Others had tears streaming down their faces.—AFP
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