BAGHDAD, Aug 29 (AFP) - Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has vowed to crush militia across Iraq who refuse to disarm, three days after the country's top Shiite cleric ordered the Mehdi Army out of the holy cities of Najaf and Kufa.
"We will confront this with force... It seems that there are some elements in the Mehdi Army that insist on making things more difficult in Iraq outisde of Najaf," he told Iraq's state-run Iraqiya television late Saturday.
Referring to reported clashes in the southern cities of Basra and Amara and the Baghdad stronghold of rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr, Allawi vowed force would be used to silence militia.
"The government will not permit private armed groups to operate outside Najaf regardless of whether they are Al-Qaeda groups, Zarqawi groups, bin Laden or the so-called Mehdi Army," he said.
Washington says Jordanian-born militant Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is the chief operative in Iraq for Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda terror network.
"Turning in weapons is of basic importance. The government will not back down," he said, adding that continued Mehdi Army violence cut against the government, a key national conference and the Marjaiya.
On Saturday, a spokesman for one of the country's top four Shiite Muslim clerics, known as the Marjaiya, reaffirmed that they still opposed armed resistance to the US-led foreign military presence in Iraq.
A US military spokesman said eight mortar bombs were fired at a US position Saturday in Baghdad's Sadr City, smashing into an electricity sub-station, cutting power supplies, in the southwestern part of the Shiite slum suburb.
At 10:50 am (0650 GMT), 20 minutes after the first attack, insurgents fired two mortar shells into a crowd of civilians, the spokesman added.
Sadr evacuated his shrine bastions in Kufa and Najaf on Friday following an ultimatum from Iraq's Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
But Sistani's five-point peace plan made no mention of disarming militia in Sadr City or of Shiite cities in the south where the Mehdi Army has also clashed with foreign troops and Iraqi security forces.