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religion and State has been discussed “very clearly" during debates over an EU constitution. She said that some member States had talked about adding references to religion to a constitution and that the EU had always been against such a move.

Gallach said that she did not envision the EU doing anything on a European

level to ban headscarves in schools.

“This belongs to the national govem-ment of France,” she said. “On the EU level. one should not try to unify every member that is feeling pressure on im-migration. This will remain in the do-main of national responsibility." Gallach said she did not believe that any other EU countries have such a reąuire-ment banning the display of religious items in public schools.

International Herald Trtbune

Erik Eckholm of the New York Times contributed reportingfor this article from Baghdad and Chris Knight reportedfrom Paris.

Militant Sunnis hołd on

2 key Iraq cities still outside U.S. control

By John F. Burns and Erik Eckholm

BAGHDAD: While U.S. troops have been battling Islamie militants to an uncertain outeome in Najaf, the Shiite holy city, events in two Sunni Muslim cities that stand astride the crucial western approaches to Baghdad have moved significantly against American plans to build a secular democracy in Iraq.

Both of the cities, Falluja and Ra-madi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist mi-litias, with U.S. troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the deserfs edge. What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy refuges identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.

American efforts to build a govem-ment structure around former Baath Party stalwarts — officials of Saddam Husseirfs army, police force and bureau-cracy who were willing to work with the United States — have collapsed. Instead, the former Saddam loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or de-fected to the fundamentalists, or been killed. Enforcers for the old govemment, including former Republican Guard of-ficers, have put themselves in the ser-vice of fundamentalist eleries they once tortured at Abu Ghraib prison.

In the past three weeks, three former Saddam loyalists appointed to impor-tant posts in Falluja and Ramadi have been eliminated by the militants and their Baathist allies. The chief of a bat-talion of the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Guard in Falluja was beheaded by the militants, prompting the disintegration of guard forces in the city. The governor of Anbar resigned after his three sons were kidnapped. The third official, the provincial police chief in Ramadi, was lured to his arrest by U.S. marines after three assassination attempts led him to defect to the rebel cause.

The national guard commander and the governor were both forced into hu-miliating confessions, denouncing themselves as “traitors” on videos that sell in Falluja for 50 cents. The tapes show masked men ending the com-mander’s halting monologue, toppling him to the ground, and sawing off his head, to the accompaniment of recor-ded Koranie chants ordaining death for those who “make war upon Allah.”

The governor is shown with a photo-graph of himself with a U.S. officer, sob-bing as he repents working with the “in-fidel Americans,” then being rewarded with a weeping reunion with his sons.

In another taped sequence available in the Falluja market, a man identifying himself as an Egyptian is shown kneel-ing in a flowered shirt, confessing that he “worked as a spy for the Americans,” planting electronic “chips” used for set-ting targets in American bombing raids.

The man says he was paid $150 for each chip laid; then he, too, is tackled to the ground by masked guards while a third masked man, who proclaims himself a dispenser of Islamie justice, pulls a knife from a scabbard on his chest, grabs the Egyptian by the scalp, and severs his head.

The situation across Anbar repre-sents the latest reversal for the marines’ lst Expe^itionary Force, which sought to assert control last spring with an of-fensive in Falluja and Ramadi that in-curred some of the heaviest American casualties of the war.

The offensive ended, mortifyingly for the marines, in a decision to puli back from both cities and entrust American hopes to the former Baathists. The ra-tionale was that military victory would come only by flattening the two cities, and that the better course lay in hand-ing important govemment positions to former loyalists of the ousted govern-ment.

The culmination of this approach came with the reeruitment of the so-called Falluja Brigade, led by a former army generał under Saddam, a motley assembly of former Iraqi soldiers and insurgents who marched into the city in early May, wearing old Iraqi military uniforms and backed with U.S.-sup-plied weapons and money.

But the Falluja Brigade is in tatters now, reduced to sharing tented check-points on roads into the city with the militants, its headquarters in Falluja abandoned, like the buildings assigned

to the National Guard. Men assigned to the brigade, and to the two guard bat-talions, have mostly fled, Iraqis in Falluja say, taking their families and hand-ing their weapons to the militants.

The militants’ principal power center is a mosąue in Falluja led by an Iraqi cleric, Abdullah al-Janabi, who has in-stituted a Taliban-like rule in the city, rounding »:p people suspected of theft and rape and sentencing them to pub-licly administered lashes and, in some cases, beheading.

Janabi appears to be allied with an Islamie militant group. Unity and Holy War, that U.S. intelligence has identified as the vehicle of Abu Musab al-Zar-qawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist with links to Al Qaeda whom the Americans have blamed for suicide bombings in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities.

American officials say a rapid buildup of the new Iraqi Army, the National Guard and police, coupled with gathering momentum on thousands of reconstruction projects funded by $18 billion in U.S. financing, should eventu-ally improve security across Iraq.

But the Americans acknowledge that a fuli, nationwide election in January may not be possible. For now, they have identified 15 cities across the Arab parts of Iraq that they contend can be stabi-lized to make voting in January possible. Falluja and Ramadi are not among them.

The New York Times

Reportingfor this article was contributed by Iraqi staff members of The New York Times in Baghdad.

AUGUST 30, 2004