Annan warns US raids making Iraq stand-off worse

"It's definitely time now for those who prefer restraint and dialogue to make their voices heard," he said, a day after his Iraq envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, warned the security situation was hampering plans for Iraq's political future.

"Violent military action by an occupying power against the inhabitants of an occupied country will only make matters worse," he told a press conference at UN headquarters in New York.

"There is nothing cowardly or faint-hearted about this approach," Mr Annan said.

"It takes courage and dogged determination to work for peace in a violent world."

US forces on Wednesday again hammered the flashpoint Iraqi city of Fallujah as President George W Bush vowed to take "whatever action is necessary" to secure the city, a bastion of Sunni Muslim resistance to the US occupation.

Fallujah has been the scene of the fiercest fighting since US-led forces invaded Iraq in March last year at the start of the war that brought down Saddam Hussein.

Scores of US soldiers have been killed since they laid siege to the city on April 5 after four US civilian contractors were killed in an ambush.

The Iraqi health ministry says 280 Iraqis have died, including 24 women and 30 children, with 820 wounded, but the toll may be far higher.

Mr Annan said Mr Brahimi's briefing to the UN Security Council on Tuesday was a "very sober assessment" of the "deteriorating" security situation in the country.

Mr Brahimi warned of the Fallujah stand-off: "Unless this stand-off is brought to a resolution through peaceful means, there is great risk of a very bloody confrontation."

He said the continuing bloodshed had raised the question of "whether a credible political process is even viable under such circumstances" but said the international community had "no alternative" but to make Iraq work.

Mr Brahimi has been tasked with helping to craft an interim Iraqi government to take power on June 30 when the US-led occupation will formally come to an end.

He said Iraqis should name the members of that government by the end of May, in order to give them at least a month to reach "crystal clear understandings" on the role of US and other forces in Iraq after June 30.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1096980.htm