U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad delivered his blunt warning during a rare press conference after signs that talks on a new government following the December elections were not going well because of sharp differences among the country's Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political parties.

Failure to establish a unity government that includes a strong role for Sunni Arabs would fail to undermine the Sunni-dominated insurgency and throw into question U.S. plans for a phased withdrawal of the 138,000 American troops here.

Khalilzad said that overcoming the sectarian and ethnic divide requires a government of national unity, which is "the difference between what exists now and the next government." The outgoing government is dominated by Shiites and Kurds.

Khalilzad told the Shiites that the key security Defense and Interior ministries must be in the hands of people "who are nonsectarian, broadly acceptable and who are not tied to militias."

The ambassador reminded the Iraqis that the United States has spent billions to build up Iraq's police and army and "we are not going to invest the resources of the American people and build forces that are run by people who are sectarian."



Sunni Arabs accuse the Shiite-led Interior Ministry of human rights abuses and using Shiite militias against Sunni civilians under the cover of fighting the insurgency. Shiites deny the charge and say they must control security forces to protect Shiites against attacks by Sunni religious extremists.

Khalilzad cited the need for compromise, especially in the Defense and Interior ministries. He said ministers in those posts must be those "who are nonsectarian, broadly accepted and who are not tied to militias."

Otherwise, he warned that "Iraq faces the risk of warlordism that Afghanistan went through for a period." Khalilzad was born in Afghanistan and served as U.S. envoy there.

Several Shiite parties are believed to control armed militias, some of which date back to the
Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s when many Iraqi Shiites fled to Shiite-dominated Iran. On the other hand, most of the insurgents are Sunnis. Kurds maintain the biggest armed force — the peshmerga — which they maintain is the legitimate security force of their autonomous government in the north.

Shiites and Kurds dominate the ranks of the Iraqi army and police, although the United States is stepping up efforts to recruit Sunnis into those institutions.

A coalition of Shiite religious parties won 130 of the 275 seats in the new parliament. Although they have agreed in principle to a unity government, Shiite leaders insist their showing in the Dec. 15 election gives them the democratic right to control key levers of the new government.

A Kurdish alliance won 53 seats and two Sunni Arab blocs together took 55 seats — a major increase over Sunni representation in the outgoing parliament.

Iraqis have until mid-May to form a new government, but U.S. and Iraqi officials warn the process could take longer because of political differences.

Control of the security ministries is only one of several major differences standing in the way of a political agreement. Shiites insist that Sunni Arab parties work actively against the insurgency. Sunnis insist on drawing a difference between "legitimate resistance" to foreign occupation and terrorism that targets civilians.

Shiites, who comprise about 60 percent of the population, are reluctant to surrender power won at the ballot box to Sunni Arabs, who dominated political life here during
Saddam Hussein's regime. Sunni Arabs insist that programs to purge Saddam's supporters from public life be limited and not used to deprive Sunnis of a future in Iraq.

Kurds zealously guard the self-rule they have enjoyed since 1991, and many of them want to expand their autonomous region to oil centers around Kirkuk, claimed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen.

As the country faces political deadlock, violence rages.

The U.S. command said the American soldier was killed Monday by a roadside bomb southeast of Karbala, about 50 miles southeast of Baghdad. The soldier's name was not released pending notification of kin.

In Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt on a bus Monday in the Shiite district of Kazamiyah, killing 12 people and injuring 15, police said. Earlier, a bomb exploded next to tea stalls near Liberation Square, killing at least four day laborers and wounding 14, police said.

In Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, a suicide attacker blew himself up in a restaurant packed with policemen eating breakfast, killing at least five people and wounding 21, including 10 policemen, officials said.

Two more civilians died when a car bomb exploded in Madain southeast of Baghdad, police said. Eleven people, including three women, were injured.

The freed Macedonians worked for the Ecolog cleaning company at Basra International Airport and were abducted Thursday. Their kidnappers had demanded a $1 million ransom from their employers, but it was unclear if any money had been paid.

The British official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, confirmed their released.

More than 250 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq, including American reporter Jill Carroll, who was abducted Jan. 7 in Baghdad. At least 39 have been killed.

An army investigation into the case, potentially one of the most damaging allegations against British troops to emerge from the war, has allegedly repeatedly been stalled by senior officers, including one of the army’s most respected generals.

But a Metropolitan police investigation is understood to have confirmed the initial suspicions of army investigators that, despite being disabled by machinegun fire, the Iraqi was shot at point-blank range.

Zahir Zabti Zaher was killed in the same incident in which Sergeant Steven Roberts died near al-Zubayr, southwest of Basra, on March 24, 2003, three days into the war. The incident became notorious when it emerged that equipment shortages had left Roberts without any body armour.

The Crown Prosecution Service is still considering whether to take the case to court, with two soldiers facing possible murder charges and one a charge of manslaughter.

The new allegations of an "execution" explain an angry exchange of letters in November 2004 between Geoff Hoon, the former defence secretary, and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, over alleged attempts by senior officers to block an investigation.

Goldsmith was so concerned over the implications of the case that he took it out of the hands of the military and gave it to the Met and the civilian courts system.

Goldsmith wanted Major-General Peter Wall and other senior officers to be interviewed by the Met over what he said was evidence of "a concerted attempt by the chain of command to influence and prevent an investigation into this matter".

Goldsmith was "extremely angry" when Hoon refused to allow Wall to be interviewed by police, one defence source said last week. More than a year later he has still not been interviewed.

The role of officers in the case goes to the heart of the attorney-general’s concerns over the lack of independence of the military police, who remain part of the army command structure and can pursue investigations only with the agreement of military commanders.

Although officers and soldiers work very closely together during military operations, officers have been charged in only one of the six investigations into alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions by British troops in Iraq.

That was in the case of Baha Musa, an Iraqi hotel worker who died in the custody of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. After Goldsmith’s intervention Colonel Jorge Mendonca, the battalion’s then commanding officer, and Major Michael Peebles, an Intelligence Corps interrogator, were charged with neglect.

The army Special Investigations Branch (SIB) inquiry into the killings of Roberts and Zaher was repeatedly blocked by senior officers from the very start, defence sources close to the original investigation alleged. A three-man team from 61 Section SIB sent to al-Zubayr found large numbers of spent British cartridge cases but no evidence that any Iraqis had fired any weapons. They spoke to soldiers and Iraqi witnesses to piece together what happened.

Roberts and his men from 2nd Royal Tank Regiment were in three Challenger 2 tanks manning a checkpoint just outside the the small town of al-Zubayr. They had been on the road for four days with little sleep. There was apprehension about the next phase of the battle and the possibility of paramilitary Saddam Fedayeen units operating in civilian clothes.

Roberts and his men were approached by a group of Iraqi civilians apparently angry at being prevented from going into the town. Zaher came up to the checkpoint and appeared agitated.

Roberts dismounted from his tank to try to calm him down. But Zaher threw a stone at Roberts and then another. At some point — Iraqi eyewitnesses claimed on orders from Roberts — a soldier on one of the tanks opened fire on Zaher with its 7.62 coaxial machinegun, inadvertently shooting Roberts as well.

The initial evidence suggested that, while Roberts died in the burst of machinegun fire, Zaher did not, even though his torso was riddled with bullets and one arm was virtually severed from his body.

"There were a number of suspicious markers," one source said. But the SIB team was ordered by senior commanders to release Zaher’s body to his family, interview the soldiers as witnesses rather than as suspects, and treat the shooting of Roberts as "a tragic death in war".

As the news of the death of Roberts emerged, attention focused on the way in which he had been ordered to hand back the ceramic plates in his body armour.

In an audio diary recorded for his wife in the days before he died, Roberts had complained that they were going to war without the equipment they needed and that it was "disgraceful" that they had "absolutely nothing". His wife Samantha lambasted Hoon.

The death of Zaher had disappeared from view. But when the warrant officer in charge of the investigation, WO2 Phil Jackson, returned to Germany, he reported back to his immediate boss, Lieutenant-Colonel Graham Taylor, the commanding officer of SIB (Germany).

Taylor pulled strings to have the case reopened in Iraq, where SIB officers recovered Zaher’s body and an examination found that it was not the machinegun bullets that had killed him. It was two pistol shots to his head as he lay helpless on the ground.

"That evidence was very clear," a source close to the investigation said. "He died from two pistol shots to the head. There were clear grounds to suspect an execution, ie murder. You don’t do that to a prisoner."

Army sources have since claimed that Zaher had "Rasputin-like" strength and that Roberts fired his pistol at the Iraqi. But the source said this could not explain the head shots that would have killed Zaher instantly, meaning he would not have been hit by the machinegun fire at chest height.

Taylor went to Wall, who was general officer commanding 1 (UK) Armoured Division, and told him the decision not to investigate initially was flawed and the case now had to be reinvestigated properly.

Wall told Taylor there was no need to investigate. But Taylor was determined that the matter should be investigated and kept going back to Wall to explain why. Eventually, in September 2003, Wall wrote to the army’s most senior legal adviser, known as brigadier advisory, and asked him if SIB officers under his command could order an investigation against his express wishes. Sources say he was told not to block it any longer.

Goldsmith told Hoon that despite "clear advice", there was correspondence showing senior officers still "intervening to prevent investigations" by the SIB for a further five months.

Wall says in a statement he remains confident that he "acted in accordance with the interests of justice and appropriate care" for the soldiers under his command.

The Ministry of Defence declined to comment.

The Basra council was expected to send letters to the police service and other civic organizations Tuesday calling for them to stop working with British troops.

It has told its employees that they could lose their jobs if they work with the British.

However, Britain's Defence Secretary John Reid said less than .05 per cent of the nearly 100,000 British soldiers who have served in Iraq have been involved in "sustainable allegations of mistreatment of civilians."

"I insist we put it in proportion," he said.

Mr Busby, a fellow of the department of human anatomy and cell biology, compiled the report after uncovering the radiation figures through freedom of information laws.

The results were detected from testing stations at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston, Berkshire, and four other stations in the area.

Mr Busby's report found higher levels were recorded at the five sites nine days after the start of the Iraq conflict on March 19, 2003.

It says that weather conditions at the time recorded a northbound airflow from Iraq which also resulted in substantial deposits of sand from the Sahara Desert being dumped on British soil.

Mr Busby, who is a founding member of the Green Audit environmental group, says the findings are proof that uranium from munitions was carried to Britain by wind currents.

He believes official claims that the uranium is not harmful are misleading.

Mr Busby said: "The point is that it is radioactive.

"If you contaminate enough people, even at a low risk then clearly it is going to have an effect on them.

"It is contrary to human rights to contaminate whole populations with a substance that could potentially harm their health."

Government experts have dismissed the report, saying the findings are a coincidence which probably came from a local source such as a power station.

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence said: "It is not sensible to suggest that depleted uranium from munitions in Iraq can be detected around Aldermaston or anywhere else in the UK.

"There is simply no feasible transport mechanism, weather or otherwise, for this to happen."

However, Mr Busby says his findings refute this claim.

He said: "This report puts uranium weapons into the category of indiscriminate effect, the military maintains the weapons are only effective within 10 miles of their target. Clearly this is nonsense.

"The whole point is that this is not a local phenomenon, it's a global phenomenon and the radiation will affect the whole of the British Isles."

The "shock and awe" onslaught brought Baghdad to its knees in one of the most fearsome assaults witnessed by mankind.

British and US planes dropped more than 1,500 bombs on the Iraqi capital in the first day of the campaign, overwhelming Saddam's forces with a display of devastating might.

Hundreds of thousands of munitions coated with depleted uranium were fired.

Depleted uranium is valued for its ability to punch through armoured vehicles.

The vapour from the depleted uranium settles as a radioactive dust which some critics believe causes cancer.

However, the Government says the danger is short-lived and the substance is relatively harmless.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said yesterday that she had not read the magazine article.

The July 7, 2004, memo recounted Mora's 2 1/2 -year effort to halt a policy that he feared would authorize cruelty toward terrorism suspects.

It also indicates that some lawyers in the Justice and Defense departments objected to the legal course the administration undertook, according to the report.

Mora said Navy intelligence officers reported in 2002 that military-intelligence interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were engaging in escalating levels of physical and psychological abuse rumored to have been authorized at a high level in Washington.

"I was appalled by the whole thing," Mora told the magazine. "It was clearly abusive and it was clearly contrary to everything we were ever taught about American values."

Mora said he thought his concerns were being addressed by a special group set up by the Pentagon. But he discovered in January 2003 that a Justice Department opinion had negated his arguments with what he described as "an extreme and virtually unlimited theory of the extent of the president's commander in chief authority."

When the first pictures from the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib appeared in the press in spring 2004, Mora said, he felt stunned and dismayed that what he had warned against had taken place, and in a different setting than Guantanamo Bay.

Mora retired this year and now is a general counsel for Wal-Mart.

A U.N. report issued last week called for the United States to close its prison at Guantanamo Bay. In response, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld rejected accusations of torture or abuse and said the detention facility is well-run.

Q: How did you feel when you heard about that?

A: Well, it's a great relief. But I won't be, obviously, totally at ease until there is no torture and no one dies from US bombing raids. They are at home. They'll be in turmoil apparently, for a few more years. And the problem, obviously, is that there's always the possibility of complications in a population reduced to a very bad situation by years of sanctons.

Q: How long have you known about Iraq?

A: I first encountered it during the Gulf War, and 2003 was the first time I'd actually attacked the country.

Q: Would you describe Iraq as a close friend, friendly acquaintance, what?

A: No, I knew absolutely nothing about the place.

Q: Tell me what happened?

A: Well, basically, we were conducting an invasion late in the day ...

Q: Describe the setting.

A: It's in south Iraq near Kuwait, wide open spaces, a lot of brush cover, fairly shallow. But it's wild Iraqi conscripts. It's some of the best conscript hunting anyplace in the region. I've gone there, for years. ...

Q: How many?

A: Oh, probably 100,000 troops. We weren't all together . . .

Q: There was just two of you then?

A: Just two of us at that point. The guide or outrider between us, and of course, there's this entourage behind us, all the cars and so forth that follow me around when I'm out there. But the Baath Army flushed and went to my right, off to the west. I turned and shot at the soldiers, and at that second, saw them standing there. Didn't know they were there ...

Q: You had pulled the trigger and you saw them?

A: Well, I saw them mown down, basically. It had happened so fast.

Q: What were the Iraqis wearing?

A: They were dressed in orange, they was dressed properly, but they were also ... There was a little bit of a gully there, so they were down a little ways before land level, although I could see the upper part of their bodies when ... I didn't see it at the time I shot, until after I'd fired. And the sun was directly behind them — that affected the vision, too, I'm sure.

But the image of Iraq falling is something I'll never be able to get out of my mind. I started a war, and there's Iraqis falling in the thousands. And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that moment.

Satire