BAGHDAD (AFP) - Prime Minister Iyad Allawi threatened a military assault on Fallujah if the rebel bastion does not surrender Iraq's most wanted man Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, while the war-ravaged nation pleaded for aid at an international donor conference in Tokyo.
Emboldened by recent joint US-Iraq military operations against rebel areas and the ongoing disarmament of Shiite militiamen in Baghdad, Allawi said it was high time for Fallujah to return to government control before elections in January.
"We have asked Fallujah residents to turn over Zarqawi and his group. If they don't do it, we are ready for major operations in Fallujah," Allawi told Iraq's 100-member interim parliament.
The government is hoping weeks of talks with a delegation of elders and leaders from the western town of Fallujah will bear fruit and avert a showdown.
As Allawi spoke, Zarqawi's Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Holy War) group posted a video on the Internet of the purported beheading of two members of Iraq's new intelligence service whom it had kidnapped.
The authenticity of the recording could not be independently verified.
The group with alleged links to Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda militant network is accused of some of the deadliest car bombings and a string of kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq.
Anti-US attacks continued in Iraq, with six US soldiers killed in three separate bombings after US forces struck rebel positions in the Sunni Muslim hotbeds of Fallujah and Ramadi late Tuesday, killing 11 people.
But there was also some positive news regarding foreign hostages, with two Lebanese men reportedly freed and France saying two journalists seized in August were still alive.
At a donor conference in Tokyo, interim Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh told representatives of some 55 countries and organisations that donors should waive Iraq's crushing debt from the Saddam Hussein era and called on the United Nations to increase its presence in Baghdad.
"We need more UN support and we need it now. Please don't let the Iraqi people down," Saleh told the opening of the two-day conference, the first such gathering since Iraq regained its sovereignty in June.
The international community has so far failed to deliver the lion's share of reconstruction money promised at a first conference in Madrid in October 2003.
To date only 6.7 billion dollars from the Madrid funds has been spent, with Japan being the largest contributor with three billion dollars in soft credit and aid, Iraqi officials said.
Security has been a major hurdle to reconstruction and the UN's atomic watchdog delivered a dose of bad news, warning that equipment used to make nuclear weapons had been pilfered since the US-led invasion in March 2003.
In a letter to the UN Security Council, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was concerned about the "widespread and apparently systematic" dismantling of entire buildings that contained specialized equipment.
An IAEA spokesman said the agency was ready to go back to Iraq if the security situation allowed.
The Iraqi government said all nuclear sites are now fully protected after lapses in security during the early days of the US-led occupation and the IAEA had helped it build an inventory of possible nuclear materials.
Further evidence that could be used against former dictator Saddam Hussein has been uncovered in northern Iraq, where investigators completed the first full excavation of a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of Kurds, mainly women and children.
Among the dead are pregnant women, even a young boy still clutching his ball, whose bodies were ploughed into their earthen tombs by bulldozers.
In the latest violence, two US soldiers were killed and five wounded in a suicide car bomb attack against their convoy in the northern city of Mosul after three US soldiers were killed in a bomb attack late Tuesday and a fourth in another blast in the capital early Wednesday, the military said.
The attacks raised the number of troops killed in Iraq to 1,075.
Fresh clashes between armed rebels and US soldiers left six Iraqis dead and 33 wounded in the Sunni Muslim rebel foothold of Ramadi, hospital sources said.
The fighting followed Tuesday's sweep by US marines and Iraqi forces of at least seven mosques in Ramadi, sparking firefights in which two Iraqis were killed.
In Baghdad, radical cleric Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army militiamen lined up outside police stations to sell weapons to police on the third day of a five-day period for the Shiite fundamentalist movement to disarm in the Sadr City slum.
Allawi said the government would honour its promise to grant amnesty to some of the movement's members and release a number of them from prison if the militia kept its end of the deal to lay down weapons once and for all and participate in the political process.