Portrait of the Week – 5 June 2004

Minister Mr Iyad Allawi, a former Baathist who has lived in exile in Britain for decades; he was not the man America had chosen. Under the terms of a new draft resolution put to the United Nations, American and British forces would leave Iraq by early 2006, with the election of a new parliament. American forces agreed to halt offensive operations in the Shiite cities of Najaf and Kufa if Muqtada al-Sadr disbanded his armed militias there; but friction continued. Fallujah remained in the control of a brigade that is supported by the United States but which bars any Coalition forces or Western contractors entering the city. A powerful bomb killed at least 15 at a Shia mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, a mile away from the place where Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a Sunni cleric with close ties to al-Qa’eda, was shot dead the day before. President Thabo Mbeki gave a state welcome to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ousted ruler of Haiti, who has been granted asylum in South Africa after some uneasy weeks in Jamaica.