May 6, 2004 - BAGHDAD (AFP) - The US-led force in Iraq (news - web sites) named a new governor for the holy city of Najaf in an apparent bid to marginalize the radical Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr, while Arab media dismissed a claim by President George W. Bush (news - web sites) that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was un-American.
Three US soldiers and six Iraqis meanwhile died in separate bomb attacks in Baghdad, one of which also 23 Iraqi civilians, three policemen and two US soldiers outside the sprawling "Green Zone" headquarters of the US-led coalition force.
The US overseer for Iraq, Paul Bremer, named Adnan al-Zorfi as the new provincial governor for Najaf and called on Sadr's militiamen occupying the city to lay down their arms.
"The people of the Middle Euphrates are eager for a return of normal life. They are going to have it," Bremer told a news conference.
The appointment of al-Zorfi was seen as part of a strategy to marginalise Sadr, who has been holed up in Najaf since Bremer issued a warrant for his arrest in March and declared him an outlaw in connection with the killing of a rival cleric last year.
Soon after the appointment was made, US tanks, armoured vehicles and troops gathered about five kilometres (three miles) northwest of the city, apparently braced for an attack on insurgents, and one US soldiers said the road had been blocked.
A little later, explosions and gunfire were heard inside the city.
Earlier in Baghdad, witnesses said a suicide bomber sped his car around a roundabout where civilian contractors were lining up to cross the heavily fortified July 14th Bridge, used only by the military and employees of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority.
The military later said that two US soldiers had been killed and two others wounded in another bomb attack in Baghdad late on Wednesday.
The attacks followed fierce clashes between US forces and militiamen loyal to Sadr in which 10 insurgents were killed overnight in slum districts of Baghdad.
Newspapers in Arab countries heaped scorn on Bush on Thursday, a day after he promised in an interview broadcast by two Arabic satellite television channels to punish soldiers who abused prisoners in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.
"People in Iraq need to understand that I view these practices as abhorrent," Bush said, adding that "what took place in that prison does not represent America that I know."
Many Arab newspapers noted that the president did not apologize for the troops' conduct and described his broadcast as an attempt at damage limitation.
The interviews were an "attempt by Bush to shy away from his responsibility in the torture scandal," said a typical commentary in the Beirut daily Al-Liwa.
An editorial in the daily As-Safir said that "seeing George W. Bush speaking, walking, saluting, lying, promising, etc. has become torture by itself" and went on:
"It is unacceptable to claim that a few soldiers have disfigured the American 'civilized mission'... as the American plan started with a campaign of lies that paved the way for the war."
A statement by White House spokesman Scott McClellan that Bush was "deeply sorry for what occurred and the pain that it has caused" failed to satisfy the Saudi English-language Arab News, which said that even if Bush had "got down on his knees and howled apologies for the now notorious photos of abuse, no one would have believed him".
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The Washington Post, which has already published photos of naked Iraqi prisoners being forced to simulate sexual acts by grinning US soldiers or being paraded like dogs on a leash, said that about 1,000 digital pictures had been passed around among US military police.
Two leading US dailies reported that Bush had admonished Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in private for failing to inform him sooner about the photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, but the Beirut daily An-Nahar remarked that Bush "did not see the need for Rumsfeld to resign."
However, said the Arab News, "it is not the photos that are the problem. It is four years of corrosive Bush Middle East policies, coming on top of decades of US incompetence and missed opportunities."
The London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi concurred, saying "these events of torture... are the result of an American culture that intends to insult and humiliate Muslims."
It added that "not a single Arab would believe President Bush saying that torture and rape committed by his soldiers does not represent the US, because he had lied more than once before."
As the outrage at the abuse mounted, the US embassy in Cairo called Thursday for three Egyptian newspapers to "retract" pictures purporting to show US troops sexually abusing Iraqi women, saying they were fakes taken from a pronographic website.
"We have done a thorough investigation of the origin of these photos and have conclusive evidence that they originated on a pornographic website," it said. "They are clearly staged photos, done by actors, as the site itself states."
The embassy accused the opposition Al-Wafd daily, the pro-government magazine Al-Mussawar and the independent Al-Usbu of "a fundamental violation of journalistic integrity" and of needlessly inflaming "an already heated atmosphere".