Iraqi troops are ready to control some cities

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraqi troops are ready to take control of some cities as a first step toward sending home American and other foreign soldiers, Iraq's prime minister said Tuesday. But he rejected any timetable for a pullout.

Underscoring the ongoing security crisis, gunmen killed four Iraqi human rights activists in Baghdad, a car bomb killed at least three people in the northern city of Kirkuk, and a U.S. soldier died of wounds suffered in a land mine explosion.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari warned against setting a timetable for foreign troops to leave "at a time when we are not ready" to confront the insurgents.

But he said security in many of Iraq's 18 provinces -- notably in the Shiite south and the Kurdish-controlled north -- has improved so that Iraqi forces could assume the burden of maintaining order in cities there.

"We can begin with the process of withdrawing multinational forces from these cities to outside the city as a first step that encourages setting a timetable for the withdrawal process," al-Jaafari said at a news conference with U.S. deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick.

"We don't want to be surprised by a decision to withdraw at a time when we are not ready," he said.

Al-Jaafari's comments were aimed partly at defusing growing calls by Sunni Arabs and others for the Americans to set a date to leave Iraq. The prime minister, a Shiite, told parliament Tuesday that he wants any withdrawal plan to be "an Iraqi decision with an Iraqi timetable -- not with a terror timetable."

He did not specify which cities could be turned over to the Iraqis. The insurgency is focused in Baghdad and the Sunni Arab heartland of central and northern Iraq. Wide areas of the Shiite south and Kurdish north are relatively peaceful.

Most of the 135,000 American troops are based in insurgent-infested areas deemed too dangerous to hand over to the Iraqis soon.

Zoellick said Washington was committed to supporting the new Iraqi leadership and that U.S. troop strength "will be based on the conditions by which the Iraqi forces are able to meet the effort to deal with the counterinsurgency."

However, the Defense Department wants to pull some troops out of Iraq next year, partly because the commitment is stretching the Army and Marine Corps perilously thin as casualties mount. U.S. commanders believe the presence of a large U.S. force is generating tacit support for anti-American violence.

Last weekend, The Mail on Sunday newspaper of London published a leaked British government memorandum showing that Britain is considering scaling back its troops from 8,500 to 3,000 by the middle of next year.

The memo, marked "Secret -- U.K. Eyes Only" and signed by Britain's Defense Secretary John Reid, also spoke of a "strong U.S. military desire for significant force reductions" after a new Iraqi government is elected in December.

"Emerging U.S. plans assume that 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006," which would see the multinational force cut from 176,000 to 66,000, the memo said.

British officials said the document was authentic but merely reflects the government's long-standing plan to train Iraqi forces and gradually hand over security responsibility.

Zoellick's visit came one day after he signed four economic agreements with Iraqi officials in neighboring Jordan. He traveled later to Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, to watch coalition soldiers train Iraqi police and to discuss reconstruction plans with local officials.

The attack on the office of the International Organization for Human Rights occurred in the same neighborhood where Egypt's top diplomat to Iraq, Ihab al-Sherif, was kidnapped this month by al-Qaida in Iraq. The group said in an Internet posting that it killed al-Sherif several days later.

Gunmen entered the office and opened fire, wounding one staffer, according to a member of the organization, Jamal Ibrahim. Most foreign human rights and aid workers have fled Iraq due to kidnappings and killings, many of them claimed by al-Qaida.

The car bomb in Kirkuk exploded in an industrial district as pedestrians were passing by. Police then came under fire and three were wounded, one critically, police Col. Ahmed Hamawandi said.

Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, is located in one of the richest oil fields in the Middle East and is home to Arab, Kurdish and Turkomen communities, each vying for power.

The American soldier died after his vehicle struck a land mine Monday south of the capital, the U.S. military said. Three other soldiers were wounded.

In other developments:

-- Iraq's largest Sunni political party condemned the deaths in police custody of up to 10 Sunni Arabs. The Iraqi Islamic Party said the men suffocated after being locked in a van for 14 hours in 105-degree heat.

--Gunmen assassinated police Col. Amir Mirza in a market in Baghdad, police said.

--An Iraqi civilian was killed and nine were wounded in a blast in Tal Afar, scene of ongoing clashes between insurgents and U.S. soldiers.