Leave, Iraq Says to Allied Troops : Occupation: Forces remaining on nation’s soil ‘represent evil intention,’ a radio broadcast says.

Iraq demanded that all allied troops leave its territory immediately in a broadcast on Friday that told the Iraqis for the first time since the fighting stopped two days ago that U.S.-led coalition forces remain inside Iraq.

Iraq’s Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz charged that the allies’ continuing presence and ongoing air maneuvers over Iraqi soil “represent evil intention,” and he indicated they are unacceptable as part of the cessation of hostilities.

“All foreign forces must leave our country immediately and stop all provocations,” state-run Baghdad Radio quoted Aziz. “Such acts represent evil intention and do not respect the announced stands and commitments.”

Aziz’s demand, however, appeared to contradict Baghdad Radio’s triumphant broadcasts throughout the day and several times on Thursday, when the regime praised Iraq’s Republican Guard for an “epic battle” that drove all allied troops “back beyond our borders.”

Baghdad Radio, the only communications link for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s war-battered regime, gave no explanation for the contradiction.

But as tens of thousands of war-weary Iraqis in the capital spent Friday, the Muslim holy day, praying for peace and struggling to put their lives back together, the contradictory broadcasts suggested that the Iraqi regime’s postwar propaganda machine also is laboring to piece together the new, official government line for its people to follow.

In Iraq, which Hussein has ruled single-handedly for more than a decade, largely by using a sophisticated information network backed by a massive internal security apparatus that together manipulate public opinion, the pronouncements of Baghdad Radio have been of vital import for Iraq’s civilian masses.

To some extent, the broadcasts have demonstrated that, even since the ground war was launched, Hussein and his ruling inner circle remain firmly in command, despite the Iraqi army’s massive losses and the near-total allied demolition of much of the regime’s communications capability.

But two British newspapers, the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph, reported that Basra, Iraq’s second city, was the scene of anti-Hussein demonstrations Friday, with soldiers joining in. The papers quoted witnesses as saying that officials of the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party and pro-Hussein soldiers had fled, but not before killing about 20 Egyptians in revenge for their nation’s participation in the war against Hussein.

Friday’s condemnation of the foreign troop presence in Iraq, combined with continuing broadcasts claiming victory for the Iraqi forces, underscore the difficulty of Hussein’s propaganda path.

On the one hand, the regime is calling upon Iraqis to close ranks around their leader at a time when their land is under foreign threat. But at the same time, it is exhorting them to celebrate a victory of endurance, casting Iraq as an underdog that has surmounted not only a 100-hour battle against one of the largest military forces ever assembled but weeks of bombardment and months of blockade.

In Friday’s broadcast, Baghdad Radio told the Iraqis that the prolonged crisis and the lightning war constituted “a whole chapter of rare exploits, which you recorded over the past seven months of total siege. At the same time, large and rich Arab regimes sided with the unsuccessful conspiracy, supplied it with men and money and hired out its cheap and mercenary media to the dirty petrodollars.”

The Iraqi people, the regime’s commentator added, “have stood up against the raids of acrimony, vileness and hate for more than 42 days.”

In that same Friday broadcast, the regime quoted Iraq’s military spokesman in a battlefield account that appeared to undermine Aziz’s subsequent condemnation. Referring to a regime report at the height of the ground war, which indicated that U.S. commandos had parachuted behind Iraqi lines into the strategic southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, the spokesman said: “All the paratroopers dropped behind the Iraqi defensive lines at the approaches to Dhi Qar governate, southern Iraq, were wiped out after all the communications lines were cut between the coalition forces and the U.S. forces command in the Dhi Qar region.”

But a few hours later, Aziz specifically mentioned the city of Nasiriyah as territory that is still occupied by allied troops.

Such contradictions are rare for the Iraqis, who have been fed a single line from Hussein’s ruling Baath Party, both in their schooling and in their work. It was unclear what impact such subtle, but noticeable, crossed signals might have on the nation.