A heavy gunfight broke out before dawn on Thursday between the Mehdi army of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and United States forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City, killing one woman, an interior ministry official said.
The fighting occurred between 2am (11pm GMT on Wednesday) and 4am (1am GMT), the official said.
”We have no information about the incident and are checking these reports,” a US military spokesperson said.
Al-Sadr’s militia and the US military have often clashed in the past, most dramatically in August 2004 when the fiery cleric waged a bloody rebellion against US forces in the holy Shi’ite city of Najaf in which hundreds of his men were killed.
In other violence, a high ranking official at the industry ministry, Mary Hamza al-Rubai, was kidnapped on her way to work. Two cars filled with gunmen stopped her car, released her driver and took the woman away.
On Wednesday, two Iraqi journalists were snatched after leaving a press conference at the headquarters of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party.
In a separate incident, insurgents attacked an oil storage facility near the northern city of Kirkuk setting off a massive blaze, an official with the Northern Oil Company said.
He said the attack occured at 3am (midnight GMT), adding the blaze was still continuing as the sun rose.
The US military said two children died in the town of Hit during a gunfight between security forces and insurgents on Wednesday.
It said insurgents attacked a joint Iraqi-US patrol in which one Iraqi soldier and four other civilians were also wounded.
A number of bodies were discovered around the country on Thursday, including two in Nabaie north of Baghdad that were believed to be among an ill-fated expedition of police hopefuls from Samarra in mid-January.
At least 60 young men from Samarra were returning from Baghdad after failing to be accepted by the police academy when their bus was stopped by insurgents and they were taken off into the desert.
So far, police and medical sources have identified 39 corpses from the group, mostly in the region around Nabaie.
The hospital in Samarra also reported receiving the body of a civilian shot in the head, with no information about how it happened.
The body of a policeman kidnapped on Wednesday was found in an eastern suburb of Baghdad, riddled with bullets. – AFP
