Rumsfeld urges Iraq to speed government

BAGHDAD -- In the most public challenge by an American official to Iraq's new leaders, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday urged them to move quickly on forming a government and to resist calls for a wide purge in the nation's fledgling security services.

US officials are concerned about the pace of Iraq's political process 10 weeks after Iraqis bravely went to the polls. The nation still lacks a transitional government, and its parliament has yet to start writing a new constitution.

The Americans worry as well that a new government headed by Ibrahim al-Jaafari will fire thousands of officials just as Iraq's security services are finding their footing.

The Bush administration fears al-Jaafari and his Shiite Muslim-dominated Cabinet will ''come in and clean house," Rumsfeld told reporters on a flight to Baghdad before meeting with al-Jaafari and Iraq's newly elected Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani.

''We have an opportunity to continue to make progress politically, economically," Rumsfeld said. ''Anything that would delay that or disrupt that as a result of turbulence . . . would be unfortunate."

Former Iraqi army officers with Ba'ath Party ties are most in jeopardy. Some officials associated with interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi also are seen as vulnerable.

''Anything they do in the Interior and the Defense ministries ought to be with an eye to the fact that Iraqis are getting killed, and they'd better have a good reason for doing what they are doing," Rumsfeld said of the new leaders.

Also yesterday, Polish Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski said his country wanted to pull its troops out of Iraq in the first few weeks of 2006, the latest blow to the US-led coalition.

His announcement came as a suicide car bomber in the northern city of Mosul killed five civilians and injured four others, underlining the challenges facing Iraqi security forces being groomed to take over from multinational troops.

In nearby Talafar, a car bomb killed five people and wounded eight, including seven children, the US military said.

US troops battled arms smugglers and fighters near the Iraqi town of Qaim along the Syrian border, killing an unknown number of foreign insurgents, the US military said. Local hospital officials reported at least nine people killed in clashes in the same area, and said they believed the dead were civilians.

The raids came as the Iraqi government said it had captured a former member of Saddam Hussein's regime at a farm northeast of Baghdad.

The government said Fadhil Ibrahim Mahmud al-Mashadani was the leader of the military bureau in Baghdad under Hussein and it accused him of being ''among the main facilitators of many terrorist attacks in Iraq."

The Qaim raid occurred a day after insurgents tried unsuccessfully to ram two cars and a fire truck loaded with explosives into a Marine outpost there, but military officials said the attack was not related to the raid.

Insurgents opened fire when the US troops began their raid on the smuggling ring yesterday, and several militants, including at least one suicide bomber, were killed, the US military said in a statement. No Americans were injured, it said.

Hamid al-Alousi, director of the Qaim hospital, said his facility had received nine bodies and nearly two dozen wounded in the violence. Residents of a small village just north of Qaim said more than a dozen more people were buried in the area. Residents and hospital officials said the victims appeared to be civilians.

Providing no details, the Al Qaeda group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the Qaim clashes. That claim could not be verified.

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.