DONALD RUMSFELD, the US Defence Secretary, has issued a blunt warning to Iraq’s new leaders against purging the country’s security forces and filling key posts with their own allies.

“My concern is they’ll come in and clean house,” Mr Rumsfeld said yesterday before he went to meetings with Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shia Prime Minister, and President Talabani, a Kurd. “You can’t do that if you are trying to create a chain of command in the Iraqi security force and defeat a doggone insurgency.”

Last week Adel Abdel Mehdi, the newly appointed Shia Vice-President, called for an inquiry into allegations of corruption in the outgoing caretaker Government, which was installed by Washington last summer. He claimed that cronies had been used to fill senior positions in the Defence and Interior ministries.

Abdelaziz al-Hakim, clerical leader of Mr Abdel Mehdi’s party, told The Times in January that he wanted to remove any officers from the security forces who had links to the outlawed Baath party of Saddam Hussein. This raised concerns that he could fill their positions with members of his own militia, the Iranian-trained Badr Corps. While many officers do have links to the former regime, the US-installed Government chose them for their security experience and many have proved themselves to be Iraq’s most efficient forces.

Mr Rumsfeld said that such a purge could endanger efforts to end the Sunni insurgency that has cost thousands of lives.

“Anything they do in the Interior and the Defence ministries ought to be with an eye to the fact that Iraqis are getting killed and they better have a good reason for doing what they are doing,” he said. Mr Jaafari, Iraq’s first elected prime minister in half a century, tried to allay Mr Rumsfeld’s fears. “I don’t deny there are challenges, but I’m sure we are going to have very good ministers,” he said. “All of them are good technocrats, they are very efficient, from different backgrounds. I hope we face these challenges successfully and we will fight corruption.”

Mr Rumsfeld arrived days after an anti-United States protest in central Baghdad. Thousands of Iraqis, most of them supporters of Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric, marked the second anniversary of the US-led invasion by demanding the removal of American troops. There were more anti-US protests in the violent Sunni town of Samarra to the north of Baghdad yesterday.

Mr Rumsfeld said that Washington had no exit strategy drawn up, although American commanders believe that they may be able to start to scale down troop deployments soon. The US has been reluctant to offer any timetable for a withdrawal, fearing that it could inflame the insurgency and incite rival militias, which still exert huge control, to try to grab more power.

On Monday, dozens of gunmen attacked an American outpost on the Syrian border, using two suicide car bombers and attempting a ground assault. Ten people were killed in suicide attacks yesterday in and around the northern town of Mosul.

In Baghdad, where guerrillas ambushed the car of a senior interior ministry official, security forces set up checkpoints to search for an American contractor kidnapped the day before.

Meanwhile Poland said yesterday that it would withdraw its troops from Iraq at the end of this year. Jerzy Szmajdzinski, the Defence Minister, said that the decision was in line with an earlier plan. Poland has about 1,700 soldiers in southern Iraq.

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