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The US-led coalition in Iraq was reviewing the pay scale for the New Iraqi Army Saturday after some 300 soldiers walked out on the fighting force's first battalion, as the violence on the ground continued.

Meabwhile US President George W. Bush touted Saddam Hussein's ouster as part of a "year of accomplishment," but made no mention of the unfound weapons of mass destruction on which the war was predicated.

The US military commander in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, told reporters that the Iraqi troops' mass walkout was caused by unhappiness among married soldiers who said they could not support their families on a monthly wage of 60 dollars.

Sanchez also said that despite a string of recent fatalities, attacks on coalition soldiers had fallen to "around 20" per day.

"We have achieved a significant decrease in attacks," he said.

In November, which proved to be the deadliest month for US soldiers in Iraq, the number of daily attacks surpassed 35 and hit 55 on one occasion.

"We've been able to make effective headway against these terrorist and anti-coalition elements," he said, stressing that troops were taking a step back from dramatic raids.

He said more "cordon-and-knock" style operations, where US forces seal off an area where they believe the enemy might be hiding and then approach the target, spared civilians and prevented troops from alienating Iraqis.

A senior US officer was relieved of his command and fined 5,000 dollars after being found guilty of assaulting and threatening an Iraqi detainee, but will not face a full court martial, the 4th Infantry Division said.

On Friday, one US soldier died and another two were wounded after their convoy was hit by a roadside bomb in the town of Ramadi, a military spokesman said Saturday.

The Ramadi attack, 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Baghdad, came just a day after a suicide bomber blew up a furniture delivery truck outside the US military base there killing one US soldier and wounding 14.

The latest deaths brought to 197 the number of US soldiers who have died in combat in Iraq since Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

Meanwhile relatives of Iraqis detained by US forces in the prison at Abu Gharib, infamous in Saddam Hussein's times as a centre of torture and death, were demanding visiting rights.

Amid the dogged unrest, Georgia is to send 500 soldiers to Iraq by next summer US ambassador to Tbilisi, Richard Miles, said Saturday.

They will join 70 elite troops, doctors and mine-clearing experts who were sent to Baghdad in August.

Two hundred soldiers will fly out shortly, and by summer 2004 some 500 will have joined the first contingent, Miles said during a graduation ceremony for a Georgian battallion trained by US instructors.

But UN chief Kofi Annan has ruled out sending UN peacekeepers to Iraq, while saying the war-torn country would need military aid for years to come, in an interview with Germany's weekly news magazine Der Spiegel to be published Monday.

He lashed out again at the US strategy of pre-emptive action which led to the launch of the war in March and warned that if others followed suit the "law of the jungle" would prevail.

In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's special envoy to Iraq said NATO forces should take a more prominent security role in the country from the middle of next year, newspapers reported Saturday.

Bush has also been forced to deal with Pentagon allegations that Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites)'s old company, Halliburton, overcharged for work it did in Iraq, saying he expects the firm to refund the money.

The Pentagon says a subsidiary of Cheney's old company, Halliburton, charged 61 million dollars more than it should have for gasoline supplied to coalition forces in Iraq.

The subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, denies wrongdoing.

The conglomerate denies the allegation, but Bush said Friday: "If there is an overcharge, like we think there is, we expect that money to be repaid."

US Defense Department officials earlier said an audit unearthed evidence of irregularities in contracts held by Kellogg, Brown and Root.

The flap over Halliburton, which Cheney ran until he joined Bush on the 2000 Republican ticket, has embarrassed the United States as it faces criticism for excluding opponents of the war from competing for US-funded contracts worth some 18.6 billion dollars.

Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright went on the attack Saturday, criticising Washington for its contracts' decision and lack of a proper post-war roadmap for Iraq.

By invading Iraq and by its post-war actions, the United States was damaging its reputation and losing political capital, said Albright in New Delhi.

"Democracy cannot be imposed from above. That is a contradiction in terms," she said.

The present chaos in Iraq was acting like a "magnet," attracting people opposed to the United States to operate from there, she said.

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