Sadr orders militia heads out of Iraq - president

By Ross Colvin

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered heads of his Mehdi Army militia to leave Iraq and asked the government to arrest "outlaws" under a U.S.- backed crackdown, Iraq's president said on Thursday.

President Jalal Talabani made the remarks after Iraq closed its borders with Iran and Syria and as U.S. and Iraqi troops tightened their grip on Baghdad, patrolling neighbourhoods and setting up checkpoints that searched even official convoys.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani gestures during an interview with Reuters in Damascus in this January 18, 2007 file photo. Radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered heads of his Mehdi Army militia to leave Iraq and asked the government to arrest "outlaws" under a U.S.-backed crackdown, Talabani said on Thursday. (REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri)

Arab television stations early on Friday quoted the Iraqi Interior Ministry as saying the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, had been wounded in a clash north of Baghdad.

The ministry was not immediately available for comment. A U.S. military spokesman had no information on the report.

Masri, an Egyptian, assumed the leadership of al Qaeda in Iraq after Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. air strike in June. The United States has a $5 million bounty on Masri's head.

Insurgents defied a sweep by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers of Baghdad's volatile southern, mainly Sunni, Doura district, exploding two car bombs that killed four people. A bomb planted on a bus in the Mehdi Army stronghold of Sadr City killed three.

Talabani said he was unaware of Sadr's whereabouts. The U.S. military has said the anti-American cleric is in Iran, but his aides insist he is in Iraq's holy Shi'ite city Najaf. An Iraqi government official said he was in Tehran, but only for a short visit.

"I think many of his top Mehdi Army officials have been ordered to leave Iraq to make the mission of the security forces easier," the president was quoted as saying in a statement from his office.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I think it's an assumption that he's gone to Iran. I hear that. I haven't seen any factual proof of it at this point. But that's what people -- that's what I hear people think.

"I don't think he went there for a vacation. I think they're very concerned about this operation (in Baghdad). And, frankly, I think one possible outcome is that these guys will go to ground," he said in Washington.

Washington calls the Mehdi militia the greatest threat to Iraq's security. U.S. and Iraqi forces have arrested hundreds of Mehdi Army members in recent months.

MEHDI FIGHTERS

Talabani told a news conference that Sadr had asked Mehdi members to leave the country.

His comments and the melting away of many ordinary Mehdi fighters from Sadr City's streets are the clearest signs yet that the militia will not stand and fight like it did in 2004, when it twice rose up against American forces.

Some Shi'ite officials outside Sadr's movement say the militia wants to avoid a battle to protect the young cleric's political gains. Sadr's movement holds a quarter of the parliamentary seats in the ruling Shi'ite Alliance of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

An Interior Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the closure of Iraq's four border crossings with Iran and two with Syria took effect on Wednesday.

U.S. officials have long accused Syria of allowing foreign fighters to cross its long, porous border into Iraq, and at the weekend presented evidence of what they said were Iranian- manufactured weapons being smuggled into Iraq.

Some 3,000 Iraqi and British troops locked down the southern oil port of Basra, where feuding Shi'ite groups and criminal gangs have threatened security. Checkpoints were tightened on all roads out of the city as part of a 72-hour crackdown.

In Baghdad, low-flying fighter jets thundered over the capital, rattling windows. A spokesman for the U.S. military, Major Steven Lamb, said 17 suspects were arrested and three weapons caches seized.

The crackdown aims to clear Baghdad neighbourhoods of militants and weapons and then secure them in a bid to break the power of Shi'ite militias and Sunni insurgents who have turned the capital's streets into killing fields.

But military analysts say the advance publicity given to the Baghdad security plan means many militiamen are likely to have left Baghdad or are lying low until the operation is completed, rather than confront security forces.

(Additional reporting by Mussab Al-Khairalla and Ibon Villelabeitia)