Militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr yesterday rejected a government ultimatum to disarm his militia immediately and pull them out of a holy Shiite shrine here without conditions, an al-Sadr aide said.
Minister of State Qassim Dawoud said earlier yesterday that if al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia did not give up without negotiations, the government would raid the shrine within hours.
Haidar al-Tourfi, an official at al-Sadr office's office in Najaf, said he received a text message from al-Sadr rejecting the demands.
"Either martyrdom or victory," the message said, according to al-Tourfi.
Explosions and gunfire echoed through the historic heart of Najaf yesterday, after a senior aide to al-Sadr said the radical cleric's fighters would be "happy" to die as martyrs.
The intensification in the fighting came after an Iraqi minister issued another warning to al-Sadr's Mehdi army, which is surrounded by US-led Iraqi government forces at the Imam Ali mausoleum, to disarm or face an onslaught.
Eight people were killed, at least five of them policemen, and 30 wounded when mortar bombs smashed into the provincial police headquarters in Najaf, hospital and official sources said.
Minister of State Kassem Daoud had said an offensive against the Mehdi Army would be launched within hours unless the radical Shiite leader disarmed his fighters.
But key al-Sadr aide Ali Smeisim told a news conference that Daoud had nothing to do with a peace mission from Iraq's national conference, which al-Sadr had accepted.
"He is not part of the negotiations. If there is a US conspiracy orchestrated by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and US agents respond to it, then we'll be happy to be martyrs of this nation," he said.
"We made it clear earlier to all sides, including to the Iraqi government headed by [Prime Minister] Iyad Allawi, that the delegation of the conference welcomed that mediation," Smeisim told reporters in the shrine.
"We are negotiating with the committee of the national conference and we are ready to meet them again in Najaf to implement the conditions and not to negotiate," he said.
On Wednesday, al-Sadr spokesman Sheikh Ahmed al-Shaibani said al-Sadr had agreed to a three-point resolution put forward by the national conference, namely that he disarm, leave the shrine and turn his militia into a political movement. But implementation of the resolution was dependent on a ceasefire, Shaibani added.
Another aide to al-Sadr, Sheikh Aws al-Khafaji, told al-Jazeera television: "We will not hand the keys of the mausoleum to the American forces because it will be a shame that will haunt us forever."
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