Top Shia clerics reaffirmed their opposition to armed resistance to the US troop presence in Iraq on Saturday 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 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.
Gunmen hanging out of 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 militiamen 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 with fury at militia leader Moqtada Sadr for his three-week uprising against the Americans.
Three leading Shia authorities held talks with the most revered cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who convinced Sadr to end the conflict and quit Najaf's Hazrat Ali (RA) 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," said a spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi afterwards.
A team of Iraqi ministers visited battle-scarred Najaf on Saturday and discussed plans for rebuilding the holy city after three weeks of fighting that killed hundreds and drove oil prices to record highs.
The five ministers drove through a shattered urban landscape, inspected the city's Hazrat Ali (RA) shrine and held talks with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
"We have come to Najaf to consolidate the peace settlement we reached and to congratulate Sistani," Minister of State Kasim Daoud, who led the delegation, told Reuters.
The ministers arrived outside Najaf in two Black Hawk helicopters and were driven through streets littered with wreckage and ammunition into its old city in a convoy led by police cars with sirens wailing.
After inspecting the shrine, Daoud said it was now free of weapons. He said the government hoped to reopen it to the public within 10 days.
The ministers held a 20-minute meeting with Sistani to discuss the government's plan to rebuild battle-damaged Najaf and to restore water, electricity, and sewage and hospital services.
Surveying Najaf streets strewn with mangled vehicles and mortar shells, the ministers promised the city would be rebuilt.
"The destruction is huge," Health Minister Alaadin Alwan said. "Najaf is going to be a big priority in the budget of the government. It needs a great deal of work to rebuild it."
Public Works Minister Nasreen Berwari said the government would "bring Najaf back to what it was before the war".
Iran's national heritage organisation has offered to pay for repairs to the shrine, where fire engines hosed down the outer walls of the mosque compound, pockmarked with 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.
But fighting between Sadr's militiamen and US forces has taken a heavy toll. At one makeshift graveyard, residents exhumed the bodies of people they said were militants from Sadr's Mehdi Army and a few civilians. The fighters' names were written on pieces of paper stuffed into small medicine bottles and placed above the graves. They were described as "hero martyrs".
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 kalashnikovs 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 told AFP.
"Our fighters are still here. They will be able to go back to their work whilst remaining an army."
Moqtada Sadr 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 must be emptied of militiamen.
It made no mention of the militia's Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City or of cities in the south where the Mehdi Army has also clashed with foreign troops and Iraqi security forces.
Meanwhile, two French nationals have been taken hostage in Iraq by Islamic militants demanding the rescinding of a ban on the Islamic headscarf in French schools, the Arabic satellite news channel Al-Jazeera reported on Saturday.
The kidnappers from the Islamic Army in Iraq, the same group which killed Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni after taking him hostage, gave Paris a 48-hour ultimatum to meet its demands, the Qatar-based television said citing "our own sources in Iraq".
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