BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq announced plans to roll out an arms-for-cash programme across the country as hopes of fresh talks to avert a US military showdown in the Iraqi rebel hub of Fallujah rose with the release of a key negotiator.
Britain said it was mulling a request from Washington to redeploy some of its troops in Iraq from their current base in the southern city of Basra to restive areas under US control.
Meanwhile, the insurgency claimed more lives with officials reporting 13 Iraqis were killed in bomb attacks across the country over the past 24 hours as Muslims mark the holy fasting month of Ramadan.
And a group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq has said it executed two Macedonian men it accused of spying for US forces, Al-Jazeera television reported.
Iraq's hard-nosed premier Iyad Allawi offered sweeteners to the Sunni Muslim heartland during a month that saw major military offenses unleashed in Samarra, around Fallujah and just south of Baghdad.
Allawi announced plans to bring the weapons buyback programme that started last week in a Baghdad Shiite slum to cities nationwide in a bid to rid the streets of weapons ahead of planned January elections.
"We will open this disarmament initiative to all the cities in the country, we will start with Basra," Iraq's second largest city in the south of the country, Allawi said in a speech to parliament.
A week-long weapons-for-cash scheme to disarm the militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City was a success and had already has been extended until Thursday, Allawi said.
Allawi also offered a sweetener of two million dollars in reconstruction money to residents of the insurgent-controlled city of Fallujah, which has been bombed heavily since June.
US and Iraqi forces are desperate to crush a seething insurgency ahead of planned January elections and Allawi has warned that Fallujah could face an invasion if it fails to hand over public enemy number one Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
More than 1,000 troops encircled Fallujah over the weekend, trading fire with rebel fighters and pounding targets from the air, but the situation appeared calmer on Monday, residents said.
Iraqi officials also said US troops had freed Sheikh Khaled Hamoud, a Fallujah leader involved in peace negotiations with the government, after holding him in detention since Friday.
It was not possible to obtain an immediate comment from the US army, which has neither confirmed nor denied it arrested Hamoud.
Sheikh Abdul Hamid Jadu, one of the negotiator's colleagues, described the release as a step forward to help revive stalled peace talks with the government.
"If the US bombing stops that would be another positive indication and the negotiating channels could be reopened," Jadu said. "From the beginning we have been calling for a peaceful solution."
Hamoud is a member of a delegation working on a peace deal but negotiations failed on Thursday after Allawi ordered them to hand over the Jordanian-born Zarqawi, who has been blamed for a string of car bombings, hostage-takings and beheadings.
With the United States concentrating on Fallujah, British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon told parliament the government was considering whether to redeploy British troops to restive areas patrolled by US troops.
"The US request is for a limited number of UK ground forces to be made available to relieve US forces and to allow them, in turn, to participate in further operations elsewhere in Iraq, to maintain the continuing pressure on terrorists," Hoon told parliament.
In contrast, Australia, another top US ally, said it has turned down a UN plea for a contribution to a military force to protect its personnel in Iraq but would train a contingent of Fijian troops to do the task.
Cracks in the coalition were showing elsewhere, as Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini was quoted as saying that Italy plans to withdraw its troops from Iraq but not before elections and the establishment of a new government.
On the ground, at least six people, three of them Iraqi policemen, were killed when car packed with half a tonne of explosives exploded late Sunday as a police convoy drove past a coffee shop, the interior ministry said.
Another 26 people were wounded, among them policemen.
Another five Iraqi civilians were killed and 15 wounded when a car bomb exploded on Sunday on a bridge in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the US military said.
On Monday, two more Iraqis died in separate roadside bomb blasts around the Iraqi capital, police said, while overnight seven policemen, a woman and her three-year-old child were hurt in a gunfight between police and insurgents in Baquba.