WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (AFP) - The United States pulled its punch in Iraq late Tuesday as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced US forces arrayed in Najaf against Shiite militants of firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr were "unlikely" to storm the town`s holy places to deal the militia a fatal blow.
The announcement, made in a lengthy interview with PBS`s "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" program, followed days of intensifying protests by Shiite communities throughout the Middle East against what they saw as a heavy-handed assault on one of the most sacred sites of Islam as well as fears that the anti-American revolt could spread throughout the Iraqi south.
Najaf is revered by Shiites all around the world because it is the site of the Imam Ali mosque, the presumed burial place of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad, the fourth caliph and founder of the Shiite branch of Islam.
"It`s unlikely that the US forces would be the ones that would deal with the holy places," Rumsfeld said. "That`s just not something that we are likely to do."
He said he believed soldiers from Iraq`s fledgling national army "would be the ones that would deal with that because it`s such a significant thing to the religion."
It was not immediately clear if the Iraqi army and a multitude of other security forces created in the wake of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq would be capable of independently dealing with Sadr`s Mehdi Army that draws its recruits from impoverished young Shiites anxious to see US and other foreign forces leave the country.
Rumsfeld insisted the forces available to the interim Iraqi government now counted about 200,000 men, of which 110,000 "probably are well-trained and well equipped."
But a recent US congressional investigation has found the newly-created security forces are "unready" to fight insurgents because their units remain inadequately trained, underequipped and suffer from a desertion rate sometimes exceeding 80 percent.
As many as 82 percent of personnel deserted from Iraqi Civil Defense Corps units deployed in Western Iraq and around the town of Fallujah last April, when anti-American guerrillas launched a spate of deadly strikes against coalition forces, according to a report released in late June by the Government Accountability Office.
The desertion rate reached 49 percent in corps units deployed in and around Baghdad, while in towns like Baqubah, Tikrit, Karbala, Najaf and Kut, it stood at 30 percent.
Police squads hardly fared better. During just one week of April 17 to 23, the force lost 2,892 personnel because some of the officers either turned out to be rebel sympathizers or proved to be incompetent and had to be sent for retraining, the report pointed out. The figure also included those killed in action.
The defense secretary offered no specific evidence showing the situation had since improved.
But he said the United States was ready to lend unspecified other military assistance to the interim government and blasted Sadr as an unstable and unreliable negotiating partner who could not be trusted.
"He clearly has behaved in an unstable manner," Rumsfeld said of the cleric. "He`s not a predictable person. He`s young. He`s not well thought of as a religious leader in the country."