NAJAF, Iraq, Aug 18 (AFP) - Iraqi Defence Minister Hazem al-Shaalan said Shiite Muslim militiamen must surrender within hours as the prime minister vowed to restore security to Najaf, where heavy fighting raged earlier Wednesday.
"The coming hours will be decisive and we will teach them a lesson they will never forget," Shaalan told a news conference on a visit to Najaf, flanked by the holy city's governor Adnan al-Zorfi.
US-led Iraqi government forces have been locked in a standoff with militia leader Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army for nearly two weeks.
"In the coming hours they must surrender," Shaalan said, stressing that Iraqi troops were making the "final military preparations" should the militiamen not lay down their weapons.
"The Mehdi Army should be dissolved and Moqtada Sadr brought before the prime minister, who is the one to decide what Moqtada Sadr's fate should be," he added.
In Baghdad, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said the government was determined to restore security in Najaf as soon as possible.
"The Iraqi government will not sit idly by in the face of this insurgency, but it is serious about restoring security and stability in the holy city as soon as possible," said a statement issued by his office.
Shaalan earlier told Al-Arabiya television that a "decisive" battle would be unleashed later Wednesday to wipe Sadr's militia out of Najaf.
"Today will witness a decisive battle against Sadr followers," that would "crush the Mehdi Army and force them out of the city" of Najaf, he told the pan-Arab television station.
"The Iraqi forces will be the ones in charge of the operation," he added.
"Only Iraqis will enter the mausoleum. There will not be an American intervention" inside the shrine.
"The American intervention will only be through cover from the air and some ways leading to the mausoleum, but the entrance into the mausoleum will be 100 percent Iraqi," he said.
Shaalan said "we have trained our sons from the National Guards to lead the assault (into the mausoleum), and God willing, it will be completed in a few hours."
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday the Americans were "unlikely" to storm the mausoleum, which would antagonise Shiites across the region, and said Iraqi forces were capable of doing the job.
One day after Sadr snubbed peace delegates from a key national conference in Baghdad who braved the violence to visit the holy Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, where Sadr's forces are holed up, Zorfi was pessimistic about peace.
"I think that options for peace have narrowed," he told the news conference.
Earlier Wednesday, US troops, backed by helicopter gunships, pounded Sadr militia bastions in Najaf's historic Old City, but an eery lull later descended in the early afternoon.