U.S. Bombs al-Sadr’s Baghdad HQ

A Marine armored column pushed through Falluja for the first time in more than a month to prove that a shaky truce with local guerrillas was holding.

But the killings of a South African and a New Zealand engineer in the northern oilfields and a bomb that shut off oil exports from the south, struck at U.S. efforts to impose stability ahead of next month’s handover of power to Iraqis.

Washington’s standing in Iraq has taken a battering with photographic revelations that soldiers sent to "liberate" them from Saddam Hussein have abused prisoners.

New accusations that officials failed to act on complaints added to pressure on an administration which says ill treatment was an exception. The first of seven U.S. soldiers who have been charged faces a public court martial in Baghdad next week.

Its main ally in Iraq was also under fire to confront allegations that British soldiers also abused prisoners.

Responding to what appears to be the main military threat at present, U.S. aircraft bombed Sadr’s offices in the restive Baghdad slum of Sadr City overnight, witnesses said.

A huge orange burst of flame rose high in the air.

At least one bomb fell on the single-storey building around 2 a.m. (2200 GMT Sunday) and virtually destroyed it. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. military, which reported 19 members of Sadr’s Medhi Army militia were killed in a series of clashes in the impoverished Shi’ite neighborhood on Sunday.

U.S. forces had raided the Sadr City office in the early hours of Sunday and arrested two people, one of them said to be a Mehdi Army financier, U.S. military spokesmen said.

In Falluja, west of Baghdad, hundreds of townspeople died last month during a siege by U.S. Marines. Fighting died down 10 days ago when U.S. commanders struck a deal with former Iraqi army officers to keep the peace.

Marines, accompanied by Iraqi security forces entrusted with eventually taking over security, arrived at the mayor’s office in the town center in armored vehicles, establishing some U.S. presence in the town for the first time since four Americans were killed on March 31.

The relative calm, however, has not eased the fears of Iraqi security forces, who worry they will suffer the fate of comrades killed for cooperating with the Americans.

"We are glad you are here with us and that you liberated Iraq, but we would like the Americans to stay out and let us deal with the security," Police Captain Hammed Alayash told Major-General James Mattis of the 1st Marines Division.

TRUST ABUSED

That trust has been damaged by the prison abuse scandal.

The Wall Street Journal said on Monday a confidential Red Cross report showed the organization alerted Washington as early as October to maltreatment in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others have said they were only aware of a problem when the case revealed by humiliating photographs was opened by the military in January.

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross told Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz of his concerns in person in January, an ICRC spokeswoman said: "We went to the top," she added.

Former Iraqi human rights minister Abdel Basset Turki, who resigned last month over the affair, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper he complained to the U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, in November and December.

"He listened very well. But that was all he did," he said.

In Kirkuk, main city of the northern oilfields, gunmen killed a South African and a New Zealand engineer and an Iraqi in a drive-by shooting, police said.

In the southern oilfields, whose revenues are also crucial to putting Iraq back on its feet, exports were reduced sharply after saboteurs blew up a pipeline on Saturday, the U.S. Army said. It was still ablaze at the southern tip of the Faw Peninsula.

Arabic television Al Jazeera aired a video tape it said was from an unknown Iraqi group that vowed to kidnap and kill Arab and foreign workers — especially Kuwaitis — in the southern city of Basra.