BAGHDAD, July 20, (Agencies): The Iraqi military has turned down several requests from American forces to move unescorted through Baghdad and conduct a raid since the transition of responsibility for urban security at the end of last month, an Iraqi military commander said Monday.
US combat troops withdrew from urban areas on June 30 under a security agreement with Iraq that requires all US troops to be out of the country by the end of 2011.
Col. Ali Fadhil, a brigade commander in Baghdad, compared the new restrictions on the US military to “house arrest” on bases. However other Iraqi officials said US troops outside of cities are still free to move without Iraqi approval.
Outside urban areas, Americans are assisting with the search and arrest of insurgents, manning checkpoints and continuing ongoing efforts to train Iraqi forces — from medics to helicopter pilots. US soldiers recently advised Iraqi soldiers during a seven-hour humanitarian aid drop in Diyala province.
The US military in Iraq had no immediate comment Monday on the relationship with its Iraqi counterparts. But it has said previously it remains available to assist them and has noted progress despite lingering questions about the Iraqi military’s resolve and training.
In Washington, the Pentagon said the two forces are cooperating.

“We continue to work closely with Iraqi security forces and coordinate operations as we implement the security agreement,” said Air Force Lt Col Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.
Fadhil spoke to The Associated Press about conditions in Baghdad, where violence has dropped dramatically since the sectarian bloodletting and insurgent attacks that swept much of the country in past years.
He cited several occasions in which Iraqi troops turned down US requests to move around the capital, and in one instance to conduct a raid — the Iraqis carried out that operation themselves.
“They are now more passive than before,” he said of US troops. “I also feel that the Americans soldiers are frustrated because they used to have many patrols, but now they cannot. Now, the American soldiers are in prison-like bases as if they are under house-arrest.”
On July 11, an American soldier shot and killed a truck driver, an Iraqi citizen, who did not respond to warnings to stop on a highway north of Baghdad. On July 9, a civilian Iraqi motorist died in a head-on collision with a US Army Stryker vehicle, the lead vehicle of a joint US-Iraqi convoy in western Diyala province.

Killed
Eight people were killed, including six police officers, in attacks in the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Ramadi on Monday, security and medical officials said.
In one attack, a policeman and a civilian were killed in a drive-by shooting targeting a police patrol in the centre of Mosul, the capital of the northern province of Nineveh.
Two traffic policemen were also shot dead — one in central Mosul and the other outside his house.
A fourth policeman was killed when a roadside bomb placed on a main road in southern Mosul exploded as he tried to defuse it.
In the western city of Ramadi, three people were killed — including two policemen — in a car bomb blast, the second attack there in a week.

Four other people were wounded, including two other police officers, in the bombing near the provincial government headquarters in the city centre.
Ramadi is the capital of the western province of Anbar, a one-time bastion of the Sunni insurgency that has seen a sharp drop-off in violence over the past 18 months as local tribes allied themselves with US-led forces.
Last week, six people were killed in a suicide car bombing near a mosque in Ramadi.
Monday’s attacks come just three weeks after US troops withdrew from urban centres in line with a security pact between Baghdad and Washington that calls for American forces to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.
Violence had dropped markedly throughout the country in recent months, but attacks increased in the run-up to the US military pullback, with 437 Iraqis killed in June — the highest death toll in 11 months.
Attacks remain particularly common in Baghdad and Mosul.

Split
Meanwhile, A row between Arabs and Kurds in Iraq’s northern province of Nineveh threatens to split the province in two and inflame tensions that could threaten the country’s long-term stability.
Kurdish local councillors in a disputed part of Nineveh currently boycotting all contact with its Arab governor Atheel al-Nujaifi vowed on Sunday to form their own splinter council if their disagreement with him fails to be resolved.
They represent 16 out of Nineveh’s 37 seats.
The Kurds see parts of majority Arab Nineveh as part of their ancient homeland and want them included in Iraq’s semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. They complain that Nujaifi has marginalised them in the provincial council since he was elected in January.
“If no solution is found, we will be forced to form the Nineveh council to run the 16 administrative units,” said Kurdish councillor Derrman Khitari, adding that he would ask the central government to divert part of its Nineveh budget.
Tensions in Mosul, Nineveh’s provincial capital, have left it a violent place, even while much of the country enjoys its best security in years. Nineveh is struggling to crush insurgent groups, including al Qaeda.
Kurds refuse to participate in a new Arab-led provincial government and several Kurdish towns vow they will not respect Mosul’s new government.
The province remains on edge. The Arab governor has avoided Kurdish-dominated areas because of security fears. Kurds and Arabs have each staged protests in Nineveh.
Provincial polls on Jan. 31 restored Sunni Arabs to power, when Nujaifi’s al-Hadba party cleaned up, raising hopes they would ease the resentment that has fuelled a violent Sunni Arab insurgency in Nineveh. Sunni Arabs had boycotted the previous provincial polls in 2005, leaving them under-represented.

Cleric
A prominent anti-American Iraqi cleric made a rare trip to Syria on Monday to discuss with the country’s president the status of foreign forces in Iraq now that US combat troops have withdrawn from the cities, said an official in the cleric’s office.
Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia battled US forces intermittently until 2008 and who is now thought to be living in Iran’s holy city of Qom, appears to be traveling more after having largely stayed out of public view in the last two years.
He made an unusually visible appearance in Turkey in May during which he met fellow Iraqi Shiites. Monday’s visit to Syria was his first public trip since US combat troops withdrew from Iraqi cities on June 30 as mandated by a security agreement with Baghdad.
A senior official in al-Sadr’s office described his meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Al-Sadr last visited Damascus in early 2006, when he was given a warm welcome by Assad. The two share an opposition to the presence of US troops in Iraq.
The US-Iraq security agreement requires all US troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. President Barack Obama has said all combat troops will be gone by the end of August 2010.
Al-Sadr’s meeting with Assad is significant because Syria has key relationships that span Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide.
The country is close with Iran, which has serious influence with Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslims. It also has good relations with Iraq’s once-dominant Sunni Arabs and hosts hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees, including stalwarts of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
The US has also been reaching out to Syria, hoping to pull the country away from Iran and Islamic militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas that it supports in the Mideast. It also hopes to enlist its support in Iraq, where figures like al-Sadr have the potential to disrupt the improved security environment.

Al-Sadr’s militia fought US troops on and off after the 2003 invasion until the Iraqi government persuaded the group to lay down its arms in 2008. Despite his wide appeal to segments of Iraq’s Shiite poor, al-Sadr was viewed as troublesome by the Shiite-led Iraqi government, and hundreds of his supporters have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in Iran-linked militant cells.
Before al-Sadr’s visit to Turkey earlier this year, he last appeared in public in May 2007, when he delivered a sermon in the Iraqi Shiite holy city of Kufa.
Al-Sadr said last year that his withdrawal from public view was motivated in part by his desire to focus on his studies to become a mujtahid, or a religious authority.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s water resources ministry on Monday called for talks with neighbouring Turkey and Syria after the flow of water in the Euphrates river fell by more than half in less than a month.
The ministry is aiming for “an urgent meeting with ministers and experts from the three countries concerned this coming August to discuss the sharing of water and the fluctuation of flows to Iraq,” a statement said.
The Euphrates’s flow “in the Hassaiba region (near the Iraq-Syria border) is very low,” it said.
“For 10 days, it has been 250 cubic metres per second (m3/s) and these quantities are not sufficient for agriculture and other needs.”
Turkey, where the Euphrates originates, opened dam floodgates at the end of June to increase the flow of water to Iraq to 570 m3/s, and Iraq said Ankara had promised to raise that further to 715 m3/s in July, August and September.
According to the water resources ministry, Iraq needs a flow of water along the Euphrates equalling around 500 m3/s to fulfill just half of its requirements for irrigation.

The flow of the Euphrates, which runs through Syria before reaching Iraq, is now running at just over half of its 2000 level of 950 m3/second.
The controversy over the sharing of the mighty rivers at the root of Iraq’s ancient name of Mesopotamia — meaning “between the rivers” in Greek — is almost as old as the country itself.
But the current dispute comes at an especially sensitive time when war-devastated Iraq is keen to rekindle diplomatic relations with its more powerful neighbours.
No compromise
The president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, Massud Barzani, insisted he will not “compromise” on longstanding Kurdish claims to the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, in a speech late on Sunday.
“We are committed to the application of Article 140 (of the Iraqi constitution) and we promise that we will absolutely not compromise on this issue or on the rights of the people of Kurdistan,” Barzani said at a campaign rally ahead of Kurdish regional elections on Saturday.

Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution calls for a referendum to decide the fate of Kirkuk, which the Kurds have long wanted to make the capital of their autonomous region in the north, an aim strongly opposed by the province’s Arab and Turkmen communities.
“Claiming legitimate and constitutional rights is not extremist or racist,” Barzani said. “On the contrary, what is extremist and racist is the denial of agreements and articles of the constitution.”
He was speaking at a rally for the joint list of the two main Kurdish former rebel factions which are expected to sweep next weekend’s elections for the Kurdish regional presidency and parliament.
In the election run-up, tensions between Barzani and the central government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki have heightened over Kurdish claims to Kirkuk province and parts of three other historically Kurdish-populated provinces — Diyala, Nineveh and Salaheddin.
During the US-led invasion of 2003, Kurdish peshmerga rebels occupied many of the disputed districts. The former rebels are now deployed alongside soldiers of the Iraqi national army triggering tensions and periodic clashes that have raised the prospect of armed conflict between the two sides.

Also:
WASHINGTON: The United States on Sunday expressed its sadness over the deaths of two employees of a US security company and the wounding of two others in a helicopter crash in Iraq, and said an investigation had been launched.
“The Department of State is deeply saddened by the deaths of two employees of Xe Consulting during a helicopter crash in Iraq on July 17 and extends our heartfelt sympathies to their families,” Robert Wood, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement.
“These men played an important role in assisting the department in protecting American diplomats and missions in Iraq,” he added.
No further information was provided on the four people killed or wounded in the accident, which occurred at Camp Butler, close to Baghdad.
Xe is the new name for the controversial US private military security firm Blackwater, which renamed itself after the Iraq government banned it in January over killings in a Baghdad square on September 16, 2007.
An Iraqi investigation found that 17 civilians died and 20 were wounded when Blackwater guards opened fire with automatic weapons while escorting an American diplomatic convoy through the square.
The State Department refused to renew annual contracts for Blackwater after the Iraq government banned it.
Wood said the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security was working with US and Iraqi officials on an investigation into the cause of the crash.