A group of about 20 Polish soldiers will spend the night at a police station in Hilla, southern Iraq, where they are surrounded by a group of militants, the Polish army said on Friday. The soldiers went to the aid of Iraqi policemen who had been surrounded by a demonstration of around 250 people loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, military spokesmen said, adding that some of the demonstrators had since left the area. "We don't want to endanger our soldiers by moving them out during the night," Lieutenant Colonel Artur Domanski, spokesman for the Polish-led multinational division, said in a live interview on television station TVN 24. "The building is specially fortified and the soldiers are well equipped, so I can be certain that they will last till morning," he said, adding that a reaction force was standing by at a nearby base if the situation worsened. Zdzislaw Gnatowski, spokesman for the General Staff in Warsaw, told Reuters no shots had been fired during the standoff, denying initial Polish media reports of gunfire. Poland commands a multinational force of 8,000 troops in south-central Iraq, including 2,500 Polish troops. Its main base, Camp Babylon, is about five kilometres from Hilla, TVN 24 said.
