Mindful of mounting criticism of their failure to maintain security in Baghdad, US forces in control there have been taking a firmer grip. Amid reports that several hundred former Baath Party officials have been killed in reprisal attacks in the city, the Americans are ordering Iraqis to hand in their weapons. 'We want to get explosives and AK47s out of the wrong hands,' said chief allied land commander David McKiernan in late May. Reports are also emerging in the US press that Washington is planning to maintain a larger force in Iraq than had been anticipated before the war, in order to impose order in the capital and elsewhere. Three US soldiers were killed during attacks in the towns of Haditha and Falluja, northwest of the capital, on 26-27 May.

American forces are also taking steps to improve conditions in the northern city of Kirkuk, where clashes between Kurds and Arabs in recent weeks killed at least 10 people. On 24 May, 300 delegates met to elect a local council. The Kurdish, Arab, Turkoman and Assyrian populations each selected six representatives and a further six councillors were appointed by the US from different business communities. While the elections passed off peacefully, some Arabs protested that five of the six US-appointed representatives were Kurds - a resentment exacerbated when the council chose a Kurd, Abdul Rahman Mustafa, as mayor on 28 May.

The US and UK governments are coming under increasing domestic pressure over their failure to find weapons of mass destruction, which were the pretext for going to war. The storm was provoked by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Speaking to reporters on 27 May, Rumsfeld counselled patience, saying that hundreds of sites had yet to be searched. However, he added: 'It is also possible that they [the Iraqis] decided that they would destroy them [the banned weapons] prior to a conflict,' unleashing a wave of accusations that the public was asked to support a war on false pretences. Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz added fuel to the fire the following day, saying in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine that the weapons were emphasised in justifying war for 'bureaucratic reasons', because the desirability of ridding Iraq of such weapons was 'the one reason everyone could agree on'. The CIA is conducting a review of its pre-war assessment of Iraq's weapons programmes.