By IRNA
Baghdad : Bloodshed continued in Iraq on Sunday and Iran urged the warring parties to sit at the table to settle their dispute.
A strict curfew was extended indefinitely in the Iraqi capital Sunday as the death toll mounted from clashes between government troops and Shia Muslim militants.
Fighting sparked by a government-led push against militias in the southern city of Basra had left more than 280 people dead by Saturday, according to Iraqi authorities.
The unrest has stretched across southern Iraq up to Baghdad, where a ban on pedestrian and vehicle traffic was kept in place just hours before it was due to expire Sunday morning.
US warplanes and British artillery struck targets in Basra on Saturday, a British spokesman said.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has given the militants until April 8 surrender their arms to a guns-for-cash program that was scheduled to end at midnight Friday.
Supporters of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia has borne the brunt of the fighting, say they have been unfairly singled out by the crackdown.
Al-Sadr has told followers not to surrender their weapons “except to a state that can throw out the occupation,” a top aide, Salah al-Obaidi, said Saturday.
The violence has sparked fears that a seven-month cease-fire by the Mehdi Army — regarded as a key factor in a dramatic drop in attacks in recent months — could collapse.
Al-Sadr’s political party holds 30 seats in Iraq’s parliament and once held seats in al-Maliki’s cabinet, quitting last year after the prime minister refused to set a deadline for US and coalition troops to leave.
Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and its chief oil port, has been plagued by turf wars among al-Sadr’s followers, the smaller Fadhila party and the country’s largest Shia party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the major partner in al-Maliki’s ruling coalition.
Al-Sadr’s militia launched two uprisings against US troops in 2004.
In August, after a series of clashes between Mehdi Army fighters and security forces linked to the Islamic Supreme Council’s Badr Brigades, he ordered his militia to suspend operations.
In an interview that aired Saturday on the Arabic-language news network Al-Jazeera, recorded before the current fighting broke out, al-Sadr compared al-Maliki to executed former dictator Saddam Hussein.
“Under Saddam’s rule, we complained about how the government distanced itself from the people and operated under dictatorial terms.
Now, the government is also dealing with people on such terms,” al-Sadr said.
But several US officials said Friday that the Iraqi military push is not going as well as American officials had hoped.
A US military intelligence analysis found that Iraqi security forces control less than a quarter of Basra, officials in both the United States and Iraq said.
“This is going to go on for a while,” one US military official said.
American troops have been supporting Iraqi forces with intelligence, surveillance and occasional air strikes and raids in Baghdad.
The US military dropped two bombs Saturday afternoon at a suspected Shiite militia stronghold in the Basra area, said Maj. Tom Holloway, a British military spokesman.
The strikes were followed by shelling from the British garrison at the city’s airport, aimed at mortar positions manned by militia fighters, he said.
Both attacks were in response to requests by Iraqi forces for air support, Holloway said.
He added that coalition forces were investigating reports of civilian casualties but had no details.
Meanwhile, at least 40 members of Iraq’s national police turned in their uniforms and joined forces with al-Sadr’s militia in Baghdad, al-Obaidi said.
They took their US-supplied weapons with them, an Iraqi Interior Ministry official said.
Mortar and rocket attacks were directed Saturday at Baghdad’s fortified International Zone, also known as the Green Zone, where Iraqi government buildings and embassies are located. No injuries were reported, a US Embassy spokesman said.