BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S.-led coalition said it killed 30 fighters in a battle
Sunday with the country's most powerful Shiite militia amid growing American
impatience with the Iraqi government's inability to stop militias responsible
for escalating sectarian violence.
Iraqi troops patrol the streets of
Diwaniyah, 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Baghdad Sunday, Oct. 8,
2006. U.S. and Iraqi troops battled the country's most powerful Shiite
militia, the Mahdi Army, in Diwaniyah Sunday for several hours.
[AP] |
The clash was the second with the Mahdi Army in the predominantly Shiite
southern city of Diwaniyah in as many months. Officials from the party of
radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which heads the militia, denied any of
their fighters were killed.
A U.S. Abrams tank was seriously damaged when it was hit by rocket-propelled
grenades, but no casualties were reported among the U.S. or Iraqi forces.
However, the military announced the deaths of five U.S. troops elsewhere in
the country. Two soldiers were killed Saturday, one in the capital and the other
northwest of Baghdad while three Marines were killed Friday in western Anbar
province, the military said without elaborating.
The deaths brought to 29 the number of Americans killed in Iraq this month,
many of them in Baghdad as part of a district-by-district crackdown aimed at
reducing mounting violence by clearing the city of weapons and fighters.
At least 14 Iraqis also died in other violence around the country Sunday,
including a Shiite woman and her young daughter who were killed when gunmen
opened fire on their minivan in Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad. The driver also
was killed, and the woman's husband and her brother were wounded.
Police also found 51 bullet-riddled bodies in various parts of Baghdad during
a 24-hour period ending Sunday morning, police 1st Lt. Mohammed Khayoun said.
They were all apparent victims of the sectarian death squads that roam the
capital, with many of the bodies showing signs of torture.
The U.S. has shown increasing impatience with the failure of Shiite Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki to rein in militias fueling the Shiite-Sunni killings
that many believe now pose a greater threat to Iraq's stability than al-Qaida or
the anti-U.S. insurgency.
Sunni leaders accuse al-Maliki of hesitating to take action against Shiite
militias because many of them, like the Mahdi Army belong to political parties
that his government relies on for support. Al-Sadr's party holds 30 of the 275
seats in parliament and five Cabinet posts, and the cleric's backing helped
al-Maliki win the top job earlier this year.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave al-Maliki and other Iraqi
leaders a blunt assessment during a visit to Iraq this past week, telling them
the violence cannot be tolerated and they have to act.
Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, gave a
starker warning following his own visit to Iraq, saying if violence does not
abate in the next two or three months, Washington should make "bold decisions"
on what to do next.
U.S. troops have been quietly launching raids on key al-Sadr loyalists and
Mahdi Army members in the past week, members of al-Sadr's party have said. The
U.S. has announced numerous arrests during the Baghdad sweep, but has not
specified what group they belong to so exact numbers could not be determined.
Al-Sadr loyalists, meanwhile, have accused the Americans of trying to start a
wider fight with the militia. U.S. troops and the Mahdi Army fought major
battles twice in 2004.
"The Americans are creating pretexts to provoke us and drag us into
confrontation," said Fadhil Qasir, a spokesman for the Mahdi Army in Diwaniyah.
The fighting in Diwaniyah, about 80 miles south of Baghdad, broke out after
U.S. and Iraqi troops entered the city looking for Mahdi Army members
responsible for the execution-style killings of 11 Iraqi army troops in August.
The slayings provoked a fierce fight at the time between the militia and Iraqi
forces that left 23 troops and 50 militiamen dead.
Coalition forces raided the house of Kifah al-Greiti, a Mahdi Army commander,
early Sunday, prompting a fierce battle with militiamen that lasted several
hours, Iraqi Army Capt. Fatiq Ayed said. The U.S. military said up to 10 teams
of militiamen with rocket propelled grenades attacked the Iraqi and U.S. troops.
Later, U.S. troops barricaded off entrances to the area to prevent militia
reinforcements from entering. The military said 30 militiamen were killed, but
Qasir rejected the claim.
The military also said the target of the raid was captured, along with three
other people. However, both police and the militia said al-Greiti had not been
arrested, and it was not immediately clear who the captured suspect was.
Sheik Abdul-Razzaq al-Nadawi, head of al-Sadr's office in Diwaniyah, said the
movement had negotiated an arrangement with the prime minister's office that
U.S. troops would not enter Mahdi Army neighborhoods in the city, and that the
presence of U.S. troops overnight had provoked the clashes.
"We don't attack, but when we are attacked, we respond," he said.
Elsewhere, authorities in Kirkuk ended a security sweep aimed at getting rid
of weapons in the northern city, which has seen escalating violence in past
weeks. An all-day curfew imposed Saturday during the crackdown was lifted.
The troops arrested some 150 suspected insurgents and seized 380 assault
rifles and 200 pistols in the house-to-house searches, police Brig. Sarhat Qadir
said. The sweep began in mainly Kurdish areas in the north of the city, then
moved down into the south and west of the city, where the Sunni Arab population
is centered.
Kirkuk, a major oil center, is at the center of a struggle for power between
Sunni Arabs and ethnic Turkmen and Kurds, who claim the city as their own and
want it eventually to be included in their self-rule enclave to the
north.
