One of Ours

...Sadr’s fighters fired mortars and other artillery from the wall of a mosque at US positions on the bridge.

[...]

On Friday, four Iraqis were killed and 13 others and two US soldiers were wounded in fighting in Kufa on the main day of rest in Iraq. Both Sadr aides and US forces accused each other of violating the truce.

In Baghdad, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy operations director, also said 16 mortar rounds were fired at a US base close to neighboring Najaf.

“These would appear to be violations of the agreement that he signed his name to,” Brig Gen Kimmitt said in reference to Sadr.

“It could take a couple of days before the true ceasefire that he offered holds, but we will wait and see and we will continue to respond as and when necessary,” he added.

[...]

But in an interview with Qatar’s Al Jazeera television late Friday, Sadr said peace would only be possible when foreign forces left Iraq.

"We are not a negligible quantity, neither in terms of numbers nor in terms of equipment. No matter how numerous the enemies are, we will stand fast in the face of this crusader offensive against Islam and we will defend these [Shiite Muslim] holy places until the last drop of our blood," he said.

The militia of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is led by former loyalists of ousted president Saddam Hussein and "terrorists", a spokesman for one of Iraq's main Shi'ite parties said today.

"The leadership of the Mehdi Army has been infiltrated by Baathists and terrorists and we have a list of their names," Sheikh Qassem al-Hashimi, of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), told reporters.

"This group planned the assassination attempt against Sayed (honorific) Saddredin al-Kubbanji yesterday and it is the same group that killed Sayed Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim and Sayed Abdul Majid al-Khoei."

Kubbanji, the Najaf-based representative of SCIRI, escaped unscathed an attempt on his life yesterday as he finished giving the weekly sermon at the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf.

Hakim, a founder of SCIRI and its former leader, was killed in a massive car bomb attack at the shrine in August while Khoei, a moderate and prominent cleric, was stabbed to death near the shrine in April 2003...