BAGHDAD (Agencies): Iraq said on Sunday it has no evidence that Iran was supplying militias engaged in fierce street fighting with security forces in Baghdad. Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said there was no “hard evidence” of involvement by the neighbouring Shiite government of Iran in backing Shiite militiamen in the embattled country. Asked about US reports that weapons captured from Shiite fighters bore 2008 markings suggesting Iranian involvement, Dabbagh said: “We don’t have that kind of evidence... If there is hard evidence we will defend the country.” Tehran strongly opposes the US military presence in Iraq, while Washington has repeatedly accused Iranian groups of arming and training Shiite militia groups in its neighbour.

Iran, whose ties with Washington have been severed since 1980, strongly denies the allegations.
US military spokesman Rear Admiral Patrick Driscoll told reporters in the presence of Dabbagh that the Americans fully supported talks between Iran and Iraq on curbing the sectarian violence.
“We welcome all dialogue between Iran and Iraq,” Driscoll said, adding that they supported any platform that could lead to an end to violence and ensure stability in Iraq where the US has deployed over 158,000 troops. Dabbagh said an Iraqi parliamentary delegation which visited Iran last week had held useful discussions and secured assurances of support.

“They talked frankly about the fears and concerns in Iraq,” he told reporters at a news conference in the tightly-guarded Green Zone of Baghdad where the Iraqi government and the US embassy are located.
He stressed that Iraq wanted closer relations with Iran. “What happend in the past is in the past,” he said referring to the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Dabbagh said that Baghdad was keen to “reorganise” its relations with its former enemy, and that Tehran supported Baghdad government moves to curb violence.
“Iran supports the government and understands the need to eliminate all militia... and allow the rule of law,” Dabbagh said, adding that the Iraqi team which went to Iran had the blessing of the government but was not “official.”
Reports from Teheran on Sunday said Iran had warned Iraq against using excessive force in its crackdown against Shiite militias.
“We support the efforts of the Iraqi government to disarm the armed militia but we advise them not to confront the population,” an official source, who was not named, told the student ISNA news agency in Tehran.
“The official position of the Islamic republic of Iran is to support the legal Iraqi government and we will do everything to ensure the security of the country,” added the source.
Militiamen mostly loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who according to his Najaf-_base_d office is currently in Iran, have been battling US troops in Baghdad’s Sadr City.
Sadr’s Mahdi Army militants have fought running streetbattles with US and Iraqi forces since late March in the district, killing hundreds of people.
First Lady
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s wife, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, escaped a roadside bomb attack in the heart of Baghdad on Sunday that wounded her four bodyguards, officials said.
The First Lady escaped unhurt as her convoy was hit by a roadside bomb while on her way to the National Theatre in central Baghdad’s Karrada district where she was to attend a cultural programme, Talabani’s office said in a statement.
Her four bodyguards were wounded, officials said, adding that it appeared to be an indiscriminate attack in the tightly-guarded capital.
Ahmed is a daughter of well-known political activist Ibrahim Ahmed who was one of the founders of the Kurdish Democratic Party, a leading political group in northern Iraq.
Born in 1948, she graduated from Baghdad University and joined the peshmerga forces with Talabani whom she married in 1970. She is now a businesswoman, owns a media group called Kakh, and is a children’s rights activist.
Meanwhile, the US military said its troops killed 13 Shiite fighters in overnight clashes in Baghdad’s Sadr City, the stronghold of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The overnight clashes saw the military use tanks and air support in a series of exchanges with the militiamen in the district that is home to some two million Shiites.
The military also reported on Sunday the deaths of four US marines in a roadside bombing in western Iraq’s Anbar province on Friday, marking one of the deadliest attacks in months against them in the former Sunni rebel bastion.
The latest Anbar attack brought to 1,290 the US military’s losses in the province since the March 2003 invasion, according to independent website www.icasualties.org, closely trailing the 1,298 killed in the capital Baghdad.
Most of the US deaths in Anbar, the biggest province in Iraq, have been caused by roadside bombs. The losses in Anbar make up nearly a third of the 4,071 US troops killed in the conflict so far.
The vast desert province which borders Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan was a key stronghold of the anti-US insurgency in the first years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Calm returned to the province, however, after local Sunni Arab tribal chiefs sided with the military in fighting al-Qaeda militants since late 2006.
The violence in Sadr City came after the US military on Saturday destroyed what it said was a command and control centre operated by militants in the district.
Witnesses said a shack had been reduced to rubble and a nearby hospital suffered serious damage in the US strike that wounded 20 people.
The Iraqi government, meanwhile, said Sunday that it had no evidence to _link_ Iranian support for militiamen leading attacks in Sadr City and called for better relations with Tehran.
On US accusations that weapons captured from Shiite fighters bore 2008 markings suggesting Iranian involvement, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said: “We don’t have that kind of evidence..
“If there is hard evidence we will defend the country.”
The US military says it supports Iraqi moves to improve relations with its former enemy, although Washington has accused Iranian-backed groups of fuelling unrest.
It charges that these groups arm, fund and train Iraqi Shiite extremists to fight US forces. Tehran denies the charges.
Journalist
Gunmen shot dead an Iraqi reporter on Sunday after hauling her out of a taxi in Mosul, a notoriously violent city in northern Iraq where journalists are often targeted and live in fear of their lives.
Police said Serwa Abdul-Wahab, in her mid-30s, was on her way to work when gunmen forced her out of a taxi in east Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, and shot her in the head.
A colleague who declined to be named for fear of being attacked said she had received a text message on her phone three weeks earlier warning her to stop reporting or she’d be killed.
Yassir al-Hamadani, a friend of Abdul-Wahab’s and the head of the Mosul branch of the Iraqi Association for Journalists’ Rights, confirmed the police version of events.
“Abdul-Wahab worked with us and was an active defender of Iraqi journalists’ rights. We’re very sad to lose her,” he said.
Police were not immediately able to say why anyone would want to target her. Fellow journalists said she was a contributor to www.muraslon.org, an Iraqi news website.
She also worked as a secretary for the electoral council, charged with preparing for Oct 1 provincial elections.
Iraq, which witnessed significant growth in the media after the 2003 US-led invasion, is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists to work, according to New York-_base_d journalism watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).


Iraqi journalists have been targeted because of their work or caught up in the cross-fire of Iraq’s many-sided conflict.
The CPJ estimates that 127 journalists, both Iraqi and foreign, have been killed since 2003, not including Abdul-Wahab.
Gunmen killed the head of Iraq’s biggest journalist organisation, Shihab al-Tamimi, 74, in Baghdad in February.
In all, three journalists have been killed this year, the CPJ said. A count by Reuters, however, puts the toll at five.
The CPJ said in a report last week that Iraq had the world’s worst record of solving murders of journalists, with 79 unsolved.
Journalists in Mosul keep a low profile, fearful of attracting the attention of al-Qaeda, which has threatened many media workers there with death. The US military says Mosul is the last urban stronghold of the Sunni Islamist group.