Moqtada Sadr's militia began slowly turning in weapons on Monday under a deal with the Iraqi government aimed at bringing a halt to months of deadly fighting in a Baghdad slum.
In the teeming Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad, machine guns, mortar launchers and ammunition were trickling in to police stations under the five-day test agreement that could clear the road for a lasting truce in one of the major flash-points of the Iraq insurgency.
A deal would shore up one flank for the US and Iraqi forces in the run-up to national polls planned for January, allowing them to concentrate on Fallujah and other trouble spots around central Iraq.
In Sadr City, police, many of them Sadr supporters, told AFP they thought the militiamen mistrusted the Iraqi government and the US military and feared the other side might take advantage of the truce to crush their movement.
Intermediaries handed in weapons at one of three police stations serving as drop-off centres which had been cordoned off by police and Iraqi National Guards. US army troops were also present at the sites.
At one station in the heart of the teeming district, about a dozen machine guns, 12 mortar rounds, 38 mortar launchers and a sniper rifle were handed in.
US battalion commander for Sadr City, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Volesky, warned that his men reserved the right to carry out raids and arrests despite the five-day test period for Sadr's men to relinquish heavy and medium weapons.
Iraqi national security advisor Kassem Daoud hailed the agreement on Sunday and said the government had more than 500 million dollars to rebuild Sadr City, with 150 million dollars coming from the Americans.
Iraqi police and National Guards will patrol Sadr City, and "the multinational force will intervene whenever is necessary," Daoud said. However, the Mehdi Army has insisted searches were not included in the deal.
If the Mehdi Army complies, Daoud said Iraq would offer amnesty to militia members not wanted on criminal charges and release Sadr followers from detention centres.
The US military announced it had freed least 154 detainees from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq but said the releases were not linked to the Sadr initiative.
Two US troops killed: Elsewhere, two US soldiers were killed and five wounded in a rocket attack in the south of Baghdad. In the northern Iraqi City of Mosul, a suicide car bomb struck a US army convoy, killing two Iraqis and wounding 18, hospital sources said.
The blast rattled the city and blew a deep crater in the road and helmets lay on the ground from US soldiers, an AFP correspondent said.
Another two Iraqis were killed in a firefight between insurgents and US marines in Ramadi.
Eyeing January's high stakes elections, US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld made an unannounced trip on Sunday to Baghdad and the Al-Asad airbase in Fallujah's province of Al-Anbar for talks with Iraqi officials and US commanders.
Rumsfeld predicted a surge of violence ahead of Iraq's election, but hoped the polls would stabilise Iraq and allow a scaling back of US troops in its aftermath.
Meanwhile, militants loyal to Zarqawi threatened in a video broadcast on Dubai's Al-Arabiya television to kill a Turkish hostage.
The group demanded the "release of all Iraqi prisoners and the departure of all Turkish nationals from Iraq" and threatened to "behead the hostage in three days if our demands are not met."
Three armed and masked men appeared in the video, with the hostage held on the floor in front of them.