NAJAF, Iraq, Aug 29 (AFP) - Two French journalists have been taken hostage in Iraq by Islamic militants demanding the rescission of a ban on the Islamic headscarf in French schools, the Arabic satellite news channel Al-Jazeera reported Saturday.
Shiite Islam's top clerics in Iraq meanwhile reaffirmed their opposition to armed resistance to the US troop presence, as life spluttered back to normal in Najaf after weeks of devastating combat.
Although the US military said attacks were down since peace returned to the Shiite holy city two days ago, at least 13 Iraqis, six of them policemen, were killed in 24 hours of violence in the Sunni belt north and west of Baghdad.
The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, citing its sources in Iraq, said kidnappers from the Islamic Army in Iraq, the same group which killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni after taking him hostage, had given Paris a 48-hour deadline to meet its demands.
The group, said the channel, is demanding that France rescind a law banning Islamic headscarves in schools, describing the law as "an injustice and an attack on the Islamic religion and individual freedoms."
Al-Jazeera identified the kidnapped Frenchmen as missing journalists Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and Georges Malbrunot of Paris daily Le Figaro and said it had received video footage of the two newsmen.
The pair went missing on August 20 after leaving Baghdad for the Iraqi Shiite holy city of Najaf, where US forces were fighting Shiite Muslim militiamen.
The French foreign ministry in Paris was unable immediately to confirm the Al-Jazeera report.
In Iraq, gunmen firing from minibuses shot dead six policemen, wounded another nine and injured two civilians at a checkpoint in Baquba, medics said.
Another person was killed in a mortar blast in the oil refinery town of Beiji, also north of Baghdad, the military said.
In Fallujah, to the west, five people were killed and 42 wounded, including children, as US forces battled Sunni insurgents over the past 24 hours in an area that has seen some of the bloodiest violence since last year's invasion.
A leading academic was killed by assailants as she drove to her university department, while two Iraqi security guards were also seriously wounded in a shootout with US soldiers in the northern oil centre of Kirkuk, police said.
In Najaf, the main thoroughfares were again clogged with traffic as shops reopened, but residents whose homes were pounded to dust seethed at militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr for his three-week uprising against the Americans.
Three leading Shiite authorities held talks with the faith's most revered cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who convinced Sadr to end the conflict and quit Najaf's holy Imam Ali shrine after a four-month occupation.
"We are not out of peaceful solutions yet to end the occupation but, when we are, no more words will be spoken and armed struggle will become a possibility," a spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi said afterwards.
Ministers also flew in for a brief audience with Sistani, whose delivery of peace to the city after his triumphant return from medical treatment in London reaffirmed him as the undisputed leader of Iraq's Shiite majority.
"We assured him that the construction process is already in progress, and we listened to his advice regarding not only the future of Kufa and Najaf but that of Iraq," State Minister Kassem Daoud said.
With the historic heart of the once glorious pilgrimage city reduced to ruins, the task of reconstruction seemed enormous.
Iran's national heritage organisation has offered to pay for repairs to the Imam Ali shrine, where fire engines hosed down the outer walls of the mosque compound, pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel.
Dozens of municipal workers swept what rubble they could into shovels, trucks and lorries, watched by armed Iraqi national guardsmen and police.
There was little sign of militiamen still on the streets, despite a US checkpoint set up on the northern side of the cemetery, an AFP reporter said.
Nevertheless, Daoud admitted Sadr's fighters had not surrendered all their weapons to the authorities, defying one of three conditions laid down by the government for halting its US-backed assault on the militia.
"Most of the Mehdi Army are turning in their weapons but some are keeping them. Disarmament is continuing," Daoud said.
But many fighters have hidden their Kalashnikov rifles at home, and stashed mortars and rocket-propelled grenade launchers in safe houses.
"They will hide their weapons but will not hand them over to the police or to the army," Sadr spokesman Sheikh Ahmed Shaibani said.
"Our fighters are still here. They will be able to go back to their work whilst remaining an army."
Weapons were also hidden after a deal in June that ended Sadr's first uprising against US-led troops. Fighting broke out again two months later.
The rebel cleric hastily evacuated his shrine bastion after submitting late Thursday to Sistani's five-point deal, which stipulated only that Najaf and the adjacent shrine town of Kufa be emptied of militiamen.
It made no mention of the militia's Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City or of Shiite cities in the south where the Mehdi Army has also clashed with foreign troops and Iraqi security forces.
Meanwhile, the body of a Turkish truck driver was found dumped on a roadside in Beiji along with a murdered Iraqi civilian, the Turkish embassy in Baghdad said.
Ramazan Erkul had been shot in the head before his discovery by Iraqi police on Friday, the embassy said.