NAJAF, Iraq — Aides to the country’s most powerful Shiite leader said they had reached a tentative agreement on Thursday to end the three week-long siege in this holy Shiite city, following a day of chaos and bloodshed here that left at least 74 Iraqis dead and more than 300 wounded.Hamed al-Khaffaf, an aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said that Muqtada al-Sadr, the rebel cleric whose fighters have held the Imam Ali shrine since early August, had agreed to the conditions set forth by al-Sistani to end the stalemate.
The proposal, which the interim Iraqi government quickly accepted, calls for the withdrawal of al-Sadr’s fighters from Najaf and the neighboring city of Kufa, as well as a pullout of American forces and the introduction of Iraqi police into Najaf. The agreement would allow al-Sadr and his fighters to keep their guns and go free.
The deal was struck during a face-to-face meeting between the two men, following the momentous homecoming of the 73-year-old al-Sistani to the city earlier in the day. The ayatollah had left the country just after the fighting began to receive treatment in London for a heart ailment. His return was well timed, coming just after al-Sadr’s forces had been decimated by a series of blistering American attacks.
The negotiations were helped along by a 24-hour cease-fire called on Thursday afternoon by the Americans and the Iraqi government. American commanders halted their combat operations at 3 p.m. Thursday but made it clear they were prepared to resume and assault the shrine itself - if al-Sadr did not quickly sign on to the pact.
The deal announced Thursday followed a day of horrific violence, underscored by the execution of an Italian journalist, Enzo Baldoni, who disappeared last week while traveling to Najaf.
In the neighboring city of Kufa, a mortar attack on a mosque where thousands of Iraqis were gathering left dozens dead and wounded. At least 35 Iraqi civilians were killed in two other incidents, when Iraqi police fired indiscriminately into crowds of civilians who were trying to move toward the shrine of Ali.
One of those incidents occurred in the late afternoon, as thousands of Iraqis had gathered at the gates of Najaf’s old city to heed al-Sistani’s call to march on the holy shrine. But as the crowd pushed forward, a line of police officers appeared to panic, first firing into the air and then directly on the crowd.
The police officers fired dozens of rounds, setting off a stampede of terrified people who ran, fell and tripped over one another as they tried to flee. At least 15 Iraqis were killed and 65 more wounded. Some of the injured said the police had fired on the crowd after they had been fired on themselves, but the claim could not be verified.
But for this day, at least, the greater emphasis was on peace. If al-Sadr sticks to the deal, it would end one of the bloodiest episodes since the United States invaded the country, a grinding urban battle that has left hundreds of Iraqis dead and much of Najaf in ruins.
The crisis, touched off when al-Sadr’s men attacked an Iraqi police station earlier this month, has posed a difficult challenge to the interim Iraqi government, led by prime minister Ayad Allawi, which took office less than two months ago.
“Mr. Muqtada al-Sadr agreed to the initiative of his eminence al-Sistani,” the al-Sistani aide, Hamed al-Khafaf, told reporters at a news conference outside the house where the grand ayatollah was staying. “You will hear good news soon from the government and Mr. Muqtada al-Sadr.”
But deals with al-Sadr have crumbled before, and there were signs that this one could prove just as ephemeral as the others. Several times this month, and during the uprising called by al- Sadr last spring, American and Iraqi negotiators believed they had reached agreements with al-Sadr, only to learn that they had been mistaken.
Al-Sadr did not participate in the press conference called by al-Sistani’s aides Thursday night; indeed, he was spied slipping out to the street just as it got under way. Later, al-Sadr’s promised public statement failed to materialize.
As to highlight the extremely tenuous nature of the deal, al-Sistani’s aides declined to discuss key aspects of the agreement, like how and when al- Sadr’s fighters, the Mahdi Army, might actually pull out of the shrine.
“It’s too early to talk about details,” Mr. Khafaf said.
By not insisting that al-Sadr appear publicly to announce the pact, al-Sistani’s men seemed to be trying to offer the young cleric a face-saving way out of the crisis.
“There will be a mechanism that will preserve the dignity of everyone in getting out of the holy shrine,” Khafaf told Al-Jazeera television.
Indeed, the agreement does not require the surrender of al-Sadr, who is under indictment for murdering a rival cleric in Najaf last year, or any of his fighters. That seemed to raise the prospect of a repeat of the peace agreement reached in May, when al-Sadr was allowed to retreat gracefully with his army intact, only to return again.
In a statement earlier in the day, Allawi seemed only too willing to forgive al-Sadr.
“We’d like to stress again that we would provide Muqtada a safe passage if he chooses to stop the armed conflict,” the prime minister said in a statement.
Khafaf said the first step in implementing the agreement would be to allow the tens of thousands of Iraqis who heeded al-Sistani’s call to march on the shrine to do so. As with much else in the agreement announced Thursday night, Khafaf spoke vaguely about how the march would proceed but said the demonstrators had to be out of the city by Friday morning at 10 a.m.
Senior American and Iraqi officials in Baghdad said the 24-hour ceasefire was agreed to in discussions in the southern city of Basra on Wednesday night between al-Sistani and two officials of the Allawi government. They said the Iraqis had returned to the capital saying they had al-Sistani’s commitment that he would make a public demand that the last of the al-Sadr militiamen disarm and leave the shrine, and that if al-Sadr defied the demand they had al-Sistani’s assurance that he would support an assault on the shrine by Iraqi commandos.
The officials said American military pressures had eliminated virtually all resistance by the Mahdi Army outside the shrine itself. Intelligence reports indicated there were weapons hidden in the shrine, the officials said. Planning for an assault was based on the assumption that these would be used by some of the hundreds of al-Sadr supporters remaining in the shrine, who have told reporters in recent days that most of the fighters had left.
Without an order from al-Sadr for these remaining fighters to leave, one American official said, “There will be a fight.”
Either way, the officials said, the Allawi government and American commanders believed the three weeks of fighting in Najaf would end quickly, either with a last-minute al-Sadr capitulation or with Iraqi forces storming the shrine. They said a battalion of 500 Iraqi troops was ready for the assault, and that Iraqi and American commanders were confident the Iraqi troops would not fail.
“We’re close to being in a position to finish this,” an American official said.
Still, some officials at the American command complex in Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace in Baghdad acknowledged that things could go still go awry.
Ever since American troops toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime 16 months ago, al-Sistani has been careful to maintain an equivocal position on American military actions, usually condemning any use of force, by the Americans or the rebels. This leaves open the possibility that in Najaf, he could distance himself from the Americans by condemning the damage inflicted on the Old City by American bombs and tanks, and even leave al-Sadr free to claim that he acted all along to defend the shrine against American attacks.
“I am sure there are more twists and turns before this is done,” one American official said.
One of the last American actions before the ceasefire went into effect involved the use of a 2,000-pound, laser-guided bomb to strike a hotel about 130 yards away from the shrine’s southwest wall, in an area known to American commanders as “motel row.” A spokesman for the American command said the strike, a little after 2 a.m. on Thursday, had been authorized after intelligence reports indicated the hotel was a redoubt for al-Sadr fighters - and after careful calculations had been made to ensure that the bomb would not inflict damage on the shrine itself. The official said the strike had been “100 per cent successful,” demolishing the hotel.
