Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Iraq's most feared terror group al-Qaida in Iraq,
was killed June 7 in an airstrike in Hibhib, which is near Baqouba, about 35
miles northeast of Baghdad.
Throughout the morning Friday, Iraqi and U.S. military forces clashed with
attackers who were armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and
rifles in busy Haifa Street that runs into the Green Zone, site of the U.S. and
British embassies and the Iraqi government.
Two Iraqi soldiers and a policeman were wounded in the fighting, said police
Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said.
The region was sealed and Iraqi and U.S. forces conducted house-to-house
searches.
Gunmen also attacked a group of worshippers marching from Sadr City, the
Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad, to the Buratha mosque on the other side of the
city to protest a suicide attack a week ago on the revered Shiite shrine. At
least one marcher was killed and four were wounded, Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said.
The U.S. military on Friday said a Marine had died in combat and a soldier
was killed in an unspecified non-hostile incident three days earlier. Their
deaths raise to at least 2,514 members of the U.S. military who have died since
the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The new security measures came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sought to
rein in unrelenting insurgent and sectarian violence. He launched a massive
security operation in Baghdad 10 days ago, deploying tens of thousands of troops
who flooded the city, snarling traffic with hundreds of checkpoints.
While violence had diminished somewhat, the outbreak of fighting on Haifa
Street and in the Dora neighborhood apparently prompted al-Malaki to declare the
state of emergency even as Friday prayer services were in progress, sending many
residents scrambling homeward to beat the curfew.
Also Friday, police said they found the bodies of five men who apparently
were victims of a mass kidnapping from a factory on Wednesday. The bodies, which
showed signs of torture and had their hands and legs bound, were floating in a
canal in northern Baghdad, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military said it killed four foreign insurgents in a raid
north of Fallujah. Two of the dead men had 15-pound suicide bombs strapped to
their bodies. The military said an insurgent thought to be an Iraqi also was
killed in the raid, which was launched on information from a suspected arrested
in the region in previous days.
Separately, the military said, it detained a senior leader of al-Qaida in
Iraq and three other suspected insurgents Monday during raids northeast of
Baghdad, near where al-Qaida chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. air
raid earlier this month.
