Officials said the four-day deadline given to the fighters in the southern oil rich province of Maysan was successful although some militants had escaped ahead of the crackdown set to begin at midnight (2100 GMT).

"The deadline has been very successful. We have received many weapons, especially today," Defence Minister Abdel Qader Jassem Mohammed told AFP.

Mohammed said some militiamen had ran away before the start of the operation but that "many" others were still in Amara, the capital of Maysan province.

Brigadier General Saad al-Harbiyah, police chief of Amara, said 60 militiamen had surrendered ahead of the offensive and that hundreds of landmines were also discovered on Wednesday.

The latest crackdown targets Maysan province and in particular Amara which US commanders say has become a major centre for arms smuggling into Iraq from overwhelmingly Shiite Iran just over the border.

Maysan police spokesman Colonel Mehdi al-Asadi said the crackdown, called Basha'ar al-Salam (Promise of Peace), was to kick off at midnight.

"Iraqi forces have finished all the preparations," he said.

The defence minister said there would be "no curfew but in some areas cars would not be allowed."

He said the security forces had been told not to fire unless they came under fire.

An AFP correspondent touring Amara said the city was calm and local residents were largely expecting a peaceful operation.

"Sons of Maysan welcome Basha'ar al-Salam" was scribbled on a wall of a house. Another said: "Thousands of warm regards to the hero of the operation, Nuri al-Maliki."

On Wednesday there was a strong presence of security personnel in the city, mostly Iraqi police. Policemen manning machine guns could be seen behind blast walls on the city's main roads.

The operation in Amara follows a similar crackdown launched by Maliki against Shiite militia in the main southern city of Basra in March.

That crackdown set off intense fighting between troops and militiamen, mostly from radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, in Shiite areas across Iraq in which hundreds of people were killed before a May 10 ceasefire.

The AFP correspondent said that the office of the Sadr movement in the centre of Amara had been abandoned.

The mansion-like building was deserted and the policemen guarding it said that Sadr's supporters left the premises on Tuesday night.

The windows of the building were broken and there were several bullet holes on the walls. "They left in the night. There was no fight," a policeman said when asked the reason for the bullet holes.

On Tuesday, police recovered four truckloads of weapons, including rockets and mortars, from a graveyard in central Amara.

The south is the source of the majority of Iraq's oil output and officials say that the crackdown on militia groups there is aimed at ending the widespread smuggling of crude from which many of them derive their funding.

But some analysts say the crackdown is also an attempt by Maliki and his Shiite ally, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, to weaken the power of their Sadrist rivals ahead of provincial elections due in October.

Sadr aides have repeatedly charged that their movement has been singled out in the crackdown, prompting orders from the prime minister to the security forces on Wednesday to refrain from random arrests of Sadr supporters.

"He has stressed that only outlaws must be arrested and he hopes that the Sadr leaders will help in isolating such elements to get rid of them," Maliki's office said.

In previous crackdowns, random arrests of Sadr supporters stoked the fighting between militiamen and the security forces.

British troops transferred security control of Maysan to Iraqi forces in April 2007, but security in the province has remained fragile with intense fighting between rival Shiite groups to gain supremacy.

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