Aug. 16, 2004, 1:12AM
Iraqi delegates stage anti-U.S. protests
Mortar shells hit near conference; 2 killed, 17 injured
By JOHN F. BURNS
New York Times
BAGHDAD, IRAQ - A conference of more than 1,100 Iraqis chosen to take the country a crucial step further toward constitutional democracy convened in Baghdad on Sunday under siegelike conditions, only to be thrown into disorder by delegates staging angry protests against the U.S.-led military operation in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
After an opening speech by Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, delegates leapt out of their seats demanding that the conference be suspended. One Shiite delegate stormed the stage shouting, "We demand that military operations in Najaf stop immediately!"
Shortly afterward, two mortar shells fired at the area where the meeting was being held landed in a bus and truck terminal nearby, killing two people and wounding at least 17.
The three-day conference, called to elect a 100-member commission that will organize elections in January and hold veto powers over decrees passed by the Allawi government, was not halted.
But reporters who had been told to wear flak jackets and helmets when entering the convention center complex past U.S. tanks were frantically waved back from the center's plate glass windows as the mortar shells exploded, shaking the complex and rattling the windows.
<b.In many ways, the scene seemed like a metaphor for America's problems in Iraq, with widespread insurrection reaching to virtually every Sunni and Shiite town across this nation of 25 million threatening to overwhelm plans for three rounds of national elections next year, ending with a fully elected government in January 2006.
Widespread insurrection
Just as U.S. troops in Najaf have failed so far to quell an uprising by a rebel Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, so do U.S. political plans for Iraq remain hostage to the violence that has made much of the country enemy territory for the Americans.
The fighting in Najaf, which resumed on Sunday after the Allawi government walked out of truce talks, is part of a wider insurrection across southern Iraq by militiamen loyal to al-Sadr, who has cast himself as a tribune of the Shiite underclass and as the leader of a national resistance movement against U.S. troops.
By using Iraqi troops, Allawi and the U.S. officials who are his partners in Baghdad hope to avoid the eruption of fury in Iraq's majority Shiite community — and across the wider Shiite world, particularly in Iran — if U.S. troops were seen to have damaged or in any way desecrated the mosque, which is revered as the burial place of Imam Ali, Shiism's founding saint.
Reporters ordered out
In a further sign that a new push against al-Sadr might be imminent, the Allawi government ordered the expulsion of all reporters in Najaf, Iraqis as well as Westerners, and even warned Najaf residents working as freelancers for Western news outlets to cease work.
"I received orders from the interior minister, who demands that all local, Arab and foreign journalists leave the hotel and the city within two hours," Gen. Ghaleb al-Jazairi, Najaf's police chief, told reporters at the hotel on the edge of the Old City.
He gave as his reason the government's inability to protect the journalists once major new battles erupted.
Taken together, the events in Baghdad and Najaf appeared to catch Iraq at a new tipping point.
Many Iraqis believe that events in the days ahead are likely to signal as clearly as anything in recent months whether the wider U.S. enterprise in Iraq can emerge from a seemingly endless sequence of reverses and achieve at least a part of what President Bush and other advocates of the war have said they are seeking here.
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