Interim Government

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The one man in Iraq with the power to single-handedly scuttle the new U.S.-backed interim government gave it a guarded but crucial endorsement yesterday. The statement from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani came on a day when the United Nation's Security Council wrangled over the scope of Iraq's sovereignty and its control over security forces after June 30. Meanwhile, in the southern city of Kufa, sporadic fighting continued between U.S. forces and the militia of renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, killing six Iraqis and wounding 11. In Baghdad, as well, there was no respite from the violence as mortar rounds rained on a busy thoroughfare near the Italian Embassy.

In choosing a slate of pro-Western moderates to form a new national assembly, voters in Libya'sfirst elections since the ouster of former dictator Moammar Gadhafi last year have shown that the rise of democracy in the Arab world doesn't automatically lead to governments dominated by Islamists. Preliminary tallies from the balloting Saturday indicate a coalition led by Mahmoud Jibril, an American-trained engineer who served as interim prime minister of the rebel government in Benghazi, holding a substantial lead over a rival bloc backed by the Muslim Brotherhood.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Militants kidnapped a senior Egyptian diplomat in Iraq yesterday, according to a videotape broadcast on Arab television. It was believed to be the first abduction of a high-ranking diplomatic figure in the country's turbulent postwar period. The Arab television network Al-Jazeera broadcast a videotape showing six masked, armed men dressed in black standing behind a man they identified as Mohammed Mamdouh Helmi Qutb, described by the network as the third highest-ranking diplomat in Egypt's Embassy in Baghdad.

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. Security Council authorized yesterday a regional force to protect Somalia's faltering interim government against Islamic militants, despite warnings that such intervention could spark a regional conflict. The measure, passed unanimously, lifts a 1992 weapons embargo to allow the African force to arm itself. It urges Islamic militants to join talks with the transitional government and threatens unspecified penalties against those blocking peace efforts or trying to overthrow the government.

WASHINGTON - As deadly new guerrilla attacks rocked the U.S.-led occupation, President Bush shifted policy on Iraq's political future yesterday, approving ideas for turning power over to a provisional government by the summer or fall of 2004. After two days of urgent meetings at the White House, Bush and his national security team approved an accelerated plan for elections intended to show Iraqis a "movement away from occupation" and to give them "a stake in running their own country," an administration official said.

For many, June 30 looms as a date that could either help stem the escalating fighting in Iraq or add to the growing chaos. On that day, the United States is determined to hand over sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government, the first step to national elections leading to the establishment of a democratic leadership. Will that handover mean that Iraqis will see stability and security as their own fight and work to end the violence? Or will it mean a loss of the firm hand of America that will hasten the descent to disorder?

U.S. officials expect a new Iraqi government to be in place within days to guide the country through the decisive selection of an interim government. Here are the five Iraqis who will likely lead that effort.

In FRANKFURT, Germany, the United Nations and the U.S. military said that Western air forces had suspended humanitarian airdrops to besieged Muslim-held enclaves in Bosnia after land routes for aid were reopened.Muslim and Croat leaders met in SARAJEVO to begin building a federation viewed as a key step toward ending Bosnia's 2-year-old war. Both sides appeared confident a joint assembly would approve a draft constitution and agree on an interim government to rule until elections within six months.

WASHINGTON - Iraqi civilians are being arrested arbitrarily, tortured while in jail and threatened with indefinite detention unless they pay bribes, according to a study released yesterday by Human Rights Watch. The abuse of detainees has become "routine and commonplace," the group said in its 94-page report, The New Iraq? Torture and Ill Treatment of Detainees in Iraqi Custody. The report said that Iraq's interim government appeared to be either an active participant in the abuses, or "is at least complicit."

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Nearly 20 months after the United Nations arrived to stabilize the hemisphere's poorest country and avert a civil war, there is still no cease-fire in this violent city on the sea. Blasts from tanks and machine guns go on for hours almost every day around Cite Soleil, a steamy slum at the capital's northern edge. No one knows for sure how many civilians have been killed inside. Last week, two Jordanian soldiers were shot to death and one was seriously wounded in skirmishes with local gangs.

NEW DELHI -- He was introduced as Mr. Prachanda, a future aspirant to the presidency of Nepal. Never mind that Nepal has no president, and remains, on paper at least, the last Hindu kingdom in the world. Nor that Prachanda, which means fierce in Nepali, is his nom de guerre and that he is the leader of Nepal's feared Communist rebels. Yesterday, Prachanda, in a rare public appearance, received a rock star's reception at a newspaper-sponsored conference about India and the region that was headlined by an eclectic lineup of politicians and corporate titans, including former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Haiti's presidential election crisis was shaping into a battle between protesters and polls yesterday. Front-runner Rene Preval announced "gross errors and probably gigantic fraud" in last week's voting and warned that his impoverished followers would keep demonstrating against the results. "If they publish these results as they are, we will contest them," Preval said during a news conference here, a day after tens of thousands of his supporters paralyzed the country with flaming roadblocks and stormed a hotel to demand the interim government declare him the winner.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Nearly 20 months after the United Nations arrived to stabilize the hemisphere's poorest country and avert a civil war, there is still no cease-fire in this violent city on the sea. Blasts from tanks and machine guns go on for hours almost every day around Cite Soleil, a steamy slum at the capital's northern edge. No one knows for sure how many civilians have been killed inside. Last week, two Jordanian soldiers were shot to death and one was seriously wounded in skirmishes with local gangs.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - For the second day in a row, Iraqi forces said yesterday that they had uncovered a large number of bodies of Iraqis killed by insurgents, while a series of bombings in Baghdad and elsewhere killed at least five people and wounded scores more. Thirty American contractors were injured when suicide attackers dressed as police fired on security checkpoints and then blew up an explosives-laden garbage truck near the Agriculture Ministry and al-Sadeer Hotel, officials said. Medics flew four of the Americans out for treatment, the U.S. Embassy said.

WASHINGTON - Iraqi civilians are being arrested arbitrarily, tortured while in jail and threatened with indefinite detention unless they pay bribes, according to a study released yesterday by Human Rights Watch. The abuse of detainees has become "routine and commonplace," the group said in its 94-page report, The New Iraq? Torture and Ill Treatment of Detainees in Iraqi Custody. The report said that Iraq's interim government appeared to be either an active participant in the abuses, or "is at least complicit."

LONDON -- Elections in Iraq scheduled for Jan. 30 most likely will do little to end the violence there and could embolden an already stubborn insurgency, according to former British and U.S. officials, advisers who have worked in the country, and Iraqi politicians. Today marks the official start of campaigning for a new transitional parliament, and the condition of the country is far from where American and Iraqi officials had hoped it would be. Noting the continuing violence, Sunni religious leaders are calling for a boycott of the election.

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast -- Two rival rebel leaders in Liberia have reached a settlement that could help pave the way for the formation of a government of national unity, news reports monitored here said yesterday.The rebel factions headed by Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson held peace talks Friday night in Monrovia, Liberia's capital. Mr. Johnson said that the two groups would now work together.In addition, Mr. Johnson reportedly asked for the resignation of Amos Sawyer, the head of an interim government installed by a five-nation West African peacekeeping force in November.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - One of Iraq's largest Shiite political groups accused the United States' new civilian administrator yesterday of reneging on promises to support the rapid creation of an Iraqi-led interim government. "We were talking about an interim government, with authority to make decisions," said Adel Abdel Mahdi, political adviser to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But, he said, a draft United Nations resolution by the United States is "clearly something else." But the new U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, insisted yesterday that he had no plans to delay the creation of an interim Iraqi authority and said he would hold additional meetings with Iraqi political leaders within the next two weeks.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. soldiers discovered the decapitated bodies of three Arab men yesterday along a highway north of Baghdad, while a suicide car bomb exploded at an Iraqi National Guard checkpoint south of the capital, killing two men and wounding 10 others, U.S. military and Iraqi officials said. The explosion, in the town of Suwayrah, was part of a sharp spike in violence that has racked the country since Sunday. It followed two such suicide attacks in Baghdad on Tuesday, including one that killed 47 people and injured 114 others outside police headquarters in the capital.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The United States has confronted many surprises in its efforts to forge a democratic government in Iraq, but few have been more unexpected than the transformation of Ahmad Chalabi from patrician exile to deft populist. But Chalabi is a survivor. Snubbed by the Bush administration neoconservatives who once embraced him and excluded from the interim government, he is building a grass-roots coalition of Shiite Muslim groups who lack a voice in the new Iraq. At the same time, he's reaching out to Iraq's most prominent anti-American Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers come mainly from Baghdad's urban underclass and the impoverished south of the country.