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DUBAI, Nov 1 (AFP): Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said he opposed military action against neighbouring Syria but lacked the power to prevent US troops from using his country as a launchpad if it chose to do so.
"I categorically refuse the use of Iraqi soil to launch a military strike against Syria or any other Arab country," Talabani told the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat in an interview published Tuesday.
"But at the end of the day my ability to confront the US military is limited and I cannot impose on them my will."
Talabani spoke before the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution Monday demanding full Syrian cooperation with a UN inquiry into the assassination in Beirut in February of five-time Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had stern words for Syria in her speech to the council accusing it of supporting terrorism, interfering in the affairs of neighbouring countries and having a "destabilising behaviour in the Middle East."
The Iraqi government and its US backers have long accused Syria of not doing enough to prevent the flow of men and materiel across its borders to insurgents fighting US-backed troops in Iraq.
On Monday, US warplanes struck what commanders decribed as a house sheltering an "Al-Qaeda cell leader" near the border town of Al-Qaim, in the latest in a string of operations against suspected foreign fighters in the region.
But medics in the town and Arabic media reports spoke of 35-plus civilian deaths in the air strike.
Meanwhile: At least 20 people were killed when a car bomb tore through a crowded market in the southern port city of Basra as Iraqis shopped for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr, security sources said.
Meanwhile, the month of October, the fourth deadliest month of the war for the United States, ended with the deaths of six more US soldiers in roadside explosions Monday.
According to an interior ministry source "twenty people, mostly civilians, were killed and 45 wounded in the car bomb attack," late Monday in Basra just ahead of the holiday to mark the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
The bomb exploded as a police patrol passed, he said, quoting police reports from Basra.
On September 13, four Iraqi private security guards were killed and two wounded in a roadside bombing outside Basra, the biggest city in southern Iraq, in the last attack to hit the relatively quiet region.
In recent weeks there has been an increase in tension there however, even though the mainly Shiite population is generally less hostile to the presence of US-led troops than Sunni Arabs in north-central Iraq.
On September 19, British forces stormed a police station in Basra in search of two arrested comrades, later found and freed from a house where they had been taken from a police cell by militiamen.
The incident followed a riot in which demonstrators firebombed two British armoured cars, forcing troops to flee the vehicles
With the latest fatalities, US military losses in Iraq now stand at 2,021, according to an AFP tally. Ninety-three US troops have been killed in October alone.
Last week's casualties included the highest ranking army officer killed in action since the start of the war, Colonel William Wood, a defense official said in Washington.
But US figures pale in comparison with Iraqi civilian casualties which are estimated at around 30,000.
In Baghdad, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari said Monday he could accept the transfer of deposed leader Saddam Hussein's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti from a high-security prison cell to a secure hospital for cancer treatment.
"I am not against it (his transfer), it is a question of humanitarian rights," he told reporters, echoing similar comments a day earlier from President Jalal Talabani.
Barzan appeared in the dock on October 19 alongside Saddam and six other defendants as a special Iraqi court began their trial on charges of crimes against humanity over the 1982 killing of nearly 150 Shiite civilians.
Prosecutor Jaafar al-Mussawi said he had received no official request from the accused for a medical transfer but noted that it was up to the court to make the decision.
US-led troops meanwhile pressed an offensive in western Iraq against insurgents loyal to Al-Qaeda, killing at least one rebel but reportedly also hitting civilians in a town close to the border with Syria.
A dawn air strike in Karabilah was aimed at an Al-Qaeda cell leader, but medics reported civilian deaths as well.
A doctor at Al-Qaim hospital told AFP by telephone he had heard reports that 35 people were killed in the raid on two houses, even though his clinic on the opposite side of the Euphrates River had treated only six wounded civilians.
In the northern town of Tal Afar, scene of a massive US-backed counter-insurgency operation in September, 14 bodies were found in a shallow grave following a tip-off, a military statement said.
Twelve "were bound and appear to have been shot in the head execution-style while two others were decapitated," and appeared to have been killed between one and three months ago.
Meanwhile, many US-financed reconstruction projects in Iraq are unlikely to get off the drawing board because of soaring security costs related to the insurgency, a report to Congress said.
Security costs now represent 25 percent of the nearly 30 billion dollars appropriated by the United States for reconstruction projects in Iraq, said the report, which covers the three-month period ending September 30.
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