U.S. jet goes down in Iraq

A U.S. Air Force jet crashed Monday in a Sunni Arab insurgent stronghold west of the capital, the military said.

Al Jazeera television showed footage of the tangled wreckage of an F-16CG with a U.S. Air Combat Command seal, and of a body it identified as that of the pilot. The U.S. military said it could not confirm the pilot’s fate or the cause of the crash in Al Anbar province.

Meanwhile, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani flew to Iran to seek help in stopping the sectarian bloodshed after bombs and mortars killed at least 215 people in a Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Baghdad last week in the worst sectarian attack of the civil war.

The bombings Thursday in Sadr City, a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia, triggered waves of reprisal killings despite a three-day curfew.

The bodies of 44 Iraqis who had been shot execution-style, the apparent victims of death squads, were recovered Monday by police in Baghdad and south of the capital.

At least 20 others died in gun and mortar fire around the country, among them six Shiite workers seized by Sunni gunmen in the Shorja market in downtown Baghdad and later executed, police said.

A U.S. helicopter made a hard landing near Youssifiya, south of the capital, the military said. No injuries were reported. Officials said there was no indication of enemy fire in the area.

Talabani, who was forced to delay his trip when Baghdad’s international airport was closed because of the curfew, landed in Tehran and headed to a meeting with his Iranian counterpart, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Syria did not respond to an invitation to attend the meeting, which comes ahead of a summit Wednesday between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki in Jordan.

The White House expects Maliki to express “strong views” about his intention to deal directly with leaders in Iran and Syria, which U.S. and Iraqi officials accuse of arming Iraq’s sectarian militants.

“Their view is that the future of Iraq, if it is a subject of conversation with Syria and Iran, ought to be a conversation by Iraqis, not by others on the outside,” Bush’s national security advisor, Stephen Hadley, told reporters Monday aboard Air Force One.

Hadley said Bush intended to reassure Maliki that any decisions on the way forward would be made “in a way that is cooperative with Iraq, rather than imposed on Iraq.”

A bipartisan commission headed by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) is expected to recommend that the United States engage with Iran and Syria as it seeks new strategies in Iraq.

Britain indicated that it planned a significant troop withdrawal from Iraq. Defense Secretary Des Browne said Monday that thousands of British forces would leave by the end of next year. But he said Britain expected to provide backup for the Iraqi army and police.

Italy and Poland announced that they would be withdrawing their remaining troops, wire service reports said.

In Baghdad, gunmen attacked a number of police patrols, killing at least nine members of the mostly Shiite force.

Three mortar rounds slammed into a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood, killing at least three people and injuring 15, officials said.

A separate mortar attack caused a large fire at a Northern Oil Co. processing plant on the edge of the northern city of Kirkuk, one of several attacks on oil installations.

The country’s former leader, Saddam Hussein, listened quietly Monday as two Iraqi Kurds testified in his genocide trial, giving harrowing accounts of mass executions during a 1987-88 military crackdown.

Hussein and his codefendants have pleaded not guilty to charges of crimes against humanity, which carry a possible death sentence.

This month, an Iraqi court sentenced Hussein and two members of his regime to death for ordering the execution of 148 Shiite Muslims from the village of Dujayl in reprisal for a 1982 assassination attempt.

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zavis@latimes.com

Times staff writers Kim Murphy in London and Peter Wallsten in Tallinn, Estonia, and special correspondents in Baghdad and Hillah, Iraq, contributed to this report.