IRAQ: Iraq's interior minister pledged yesterday to double the size of the country's police force within six months to try to cope with an increasingly violent insurgency.
Bayan Jabr said the police force, which currently has 67,000 officers, would eventually bring the situation under control, but he called for patience.
"The terrorists will be finished, but it takes time," he said. He criticised neighbouring Syria for not doing enough to stop foreign jihadis from crossing into Iraq.
In the past week suicide bombers have wreaked havoc in Baghdad and in towns in the so-called triangle of death, to the south of the capital. Bombers also struck with devastating effect in the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. More than 170 Iraqis have been killed and hundreds more wounded.
In further violence yesterday, insurgents killed six policemen and a government worker in attacks across Iraq.
In the city of Basra, gunmen shot dead a university history professor, the latest of a string of attacks on academics.
Mr Jabr also told the Associated Press news agency yesterday that a large-scale security offensive next week would target insurgents in areas surrounding Baghdad.
The announcements came as radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said in an interview that the US presence in Iraq was the root cause of the country's political and security problems.
"The occupation in itself is a problem, Iraq not being independent is a problem, and the other problems stem from that - from sectarianism to civil war," Mr Sadr told the BBC's Newsnight programme in a rare interview due to be broadcast last night.
"The entire American presence causes this," he said.
Speaking from his home in the Shia holy city of Najaf, Mr Sadr, whose al-Mahdi militia waged two bloody uprisings against US troops, restated his support for armed resistance to occupation.
"Resistance is legitimate at all levels, be it religious, intellectual and so on," he said. "The first person who would acknowledge this is the so-called American president Bush who said 'if my country is occupied, I will fight'." But he cautioned Iraqis to exercise restraint. "America does not want confrontation," he said.