BAGHDAD, Iraq – Rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr wants his followers to end their uprising against American and Iraqi forces while he considers forming a political movement, senior deputies of Mr. al-Sadr said yesterday.

Mr. al-Sadr has backed off other commitments in the past, but a truce would be a major victory for interim Prime Minister Allawi, removing a serious insurgency and potentially bringing many of the Shiite cleric’s followers into the effort to build a peaceful democracy.

The announcement came amid conflicting reports on Iraq’s vital oil exports. Iraqi oil officials and the governor of Basra state said exports were shut down after a rash of pipeline attacks. However, world oil prices decreased as traders said other reports suggested some oil was still flowing. At the New York Mercantile Exchange, October contracts for light sweet crude fell 90 cents a barrel to $42.28 – well below peaks above $48 a barrel in mid-August.

Also yesterday, the American military said a roadside bomb attack on an American military convoy just outside Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, killed an American soldier and wounded two. Sheik Ali Smeisim, an adviser to Mr. al-Sadr, announced the cease-fire decision in Najaf, calling on the cleric’s Mahdi Army militiamen to “stop firing until the announcement of the political program adopted by the Sadrist movement.”

He also urged American and Iraqi troops to move out of the center of Iraqi cities, although that did not appear to be a condition for the unilateral cease-fire. Asked if the truce would take effect immediately, Mr. Smeisim said, “I hope so.”

The government has repeatedly called on Mr. al-Sadr to disband the Mahdi Army and join politics. His aides didn’t say whether he was considering dissolving his rebel group, but they said he was preparing to enter politics.

Separately, a French journalist being held hostage along with a colleague in Iraq called on President Chirac to give in to rebels’ demand to rescind a head scarf ban to save their lives, according to a video shown late yesterday on the Al Jazeera TV station. The video was broadcast hours after France insisted it would go ahead with the ban on Muslim head scarves in schools, standing firm against scrapping the law just hours before a deadline set by the captors.

“I appeal to the French people to go to the streets…because our lives are threatened,” journalist Georges Malbrunot said in English on the video. Speaking in French, fellow hostage Christian Chesnot called on Mr. Chirac and his government to rescind the ban, according to the newsreader, who interpreted his remarks into Arabic. The video showed the two unshaven men seated together in front of a gray, mud wall with a small window above them.