US forces give Iraqis control of Najaf

NAJAF, Iraq -- The US military pulled hundreds of troops out of the southern city of Najaf yesterday, transferring security duties to Iraqi forces and sticking to a schedule that the United States hopes will allow the withdrawal of tens of thousands of its forces by early spring.

The handover occurred as Marine F/A-18 jets bombed two bridges near the Syrian border, hitting infrastructure in an area where insurgents have maintained effective control despite off-and-on offensives by US forces. Insurgents have used the bridges to move fighters and arms across the Euphrates River toward Baghdad and other cities, the US military said.

In the same area, US warplanes later destroyed a building that insurgents had used to fire upon US and Iraqi troops, a US military statement said. At least two suspected foreign fighters were killed, the military said.

Suspected insurgents in the same western province, Anbar, kidnapped the son of the new governor in Ramadi, the provincial capital, officials said yesterday. Insurgents kidnapped the previous Anbar governor in May and he was killed in a US attack on the house where he was being held.

US Marines have about 5,000 men to cover the province's 24,000 square miles. American officers in Anbar say the forces are too few to bring the province under control, but US and Iraqi officials say the US raids have helped disrupt the flow of bombs and recruits into the rest of Iraq.

Roadside bombs killed two American service members yesterday -- one in Baghdad and one in Ramadi -- the US military said.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, President Jalal Talabani told Iraqiyah television that former president Saddam Hussein had confessed to crimes, including killings, committed on his orders. Talabani said he had been told by an investigating judge that ''he was able to extract confessions from Saddam's mouth."

''Saddam deserves a death sentence 20 times a day because he tried to assassinate me 20 times," Talabani said, recalling his days as a Kurdish rebel leader. Hussein is scheduled to face trial on Oct. 19 for his role in a 1982 massacre of 143 Shi'ite Muslims in the Iraqi town of Dujail.

The handover ceremony in Najaf marked the first transfer of an entire city from US to Iraqi military responsibility this year. The raising of the Iraqi flag at a former US base was ''pretty much putting the city of Najaf in Iraqi control," Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, spokesman for the US military, said in Baghdad.

US forces will continue to support Iraqi troops in an advisory role and with logistics, Boylan said.

Najaf has been the scene of relatively few insurgent attacks. In August 2004, US and Iraqi forces here launched a major assault to disarm the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that had staged two uprisings against the US military presence in Iraq.

The assault claimed dozens of lives from both sides and ended only when Iraq's most influential cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, ordered Sadr to rein in his fighters.

Tensions surged again last month when clashes erupted between Sadr's men and Iraqi Interior Ministry forces seen as loyal to a rival Shi'ite bloc, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Nineteen died in those battles.

''There's always [the] possibility of little spurts of violence here and there," Boylan said, but for US forces now, ''the top priority is foreign fighters and the Iraqis who support them."

About 400 US soldiers left the base in yesterday's handover, Lieutenant Colonel James Oliver, commander of Forward Operating Base Hotel, told reporters, and ''more will leave in the future."