United States forces attacked armed Shiite Muslim groups in Baghdad and sealed off the town of Fallujah on Monday after dozens of people died in mounting opposition to their year-old military occupation of Iraq.
Apache helicopters sprayed fire on units of the Mehdi Army, the private militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, which attacked five truckloads of US soldiers and US-trained Iraqi paramilitaries trying to enter Al-Showla, a district of western Baghdad.
The fighting erupted after the US civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, declared Sadr an outlaw and said the occupying force “will not tolerate” attempts to supplant its authority.
In the nearby squalid slum district of Sadr City, US troops opened fire on stone-hurling Shiites attending a funeral for some of the 22 Iraqis killed in fierce fighting there on Sunday.
Eight US soldiers also died on Sunday, while 85 Iraqis and 24 American troops were wounded in running street battles. The US military said on Monday that another three US troops had died since then elsewhere in Iraq.
Dozens of Mehdi Army militants in black uniforms and armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers stormed the governor’s office in Iraq’s second city, Basra, on Monday. Reports from the southern city said British troops made no attempt to intervene and were nowhere in sight five hours later.
Other Sadr supporters took over the police station and government buildings in Kufa, 140km south of Baghdad, close to the holy city of Najaf, where 20 Iraqis and a Salvadorean solider in the US-led force died in clashes on Sunday.
Sunday saw the bloodiest fighting with Shiites since the US and Britain invaded Iraq just more than a year ago to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Shiites, who make up about 60% of Iraq’s population of 24-million, welcomed the fall of Saddam, but have become frustrated with the pace and scope of political change under US-led occupation.
US marines meanwhile sealed off the Sunni Muslim town of Fallujah on Monday to capture gunmen who killed four US civilian security contracters last week and strung up two of their mutilated bodies.
A resident of northern Fallujah, Borhan Abed, said several people were killed and others wounded when US troops bombed the town for an hour-and-a-half in the early hours.
The marines also closed the main highway from Baghdad to Jordan running through Fallujah, which lies about 50km west of Baghdad in the “Sunni triangle”, the region that was Saddam’s powerbase.
Marine officers said the operation would last several days and it was unclear whether they would seize the town centre.
“Our concern is precise. We want to get the guys we are after. We don’t want to go in there with guns blazing,” said Lieutenant James Vanzant.
The widely publicised mutilation of the bodies of the US civilians sent shockwaves around the world and senior members of the US Congress publicly questioned on Sunday whether the June 30 deadline for handover to Iraqi sovereignty was realistic.
“I think we have to have security,” Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, Republican chairperson of the Senate foreign relations committee, told ABC television on Sunday.
“I’m really haunted by the June 30 problem. But I just see this as a time in which, suddenly, we give sovereignty to somebody. And now the question is, to whom? And how do they secure that?” he asked.
The committee’s leading Democrat, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, told Fox News the increase in violence could presage civil war in Iraq.
“We’re going to end up with worst of all worlds. We’re going to end up with a civil war in Iraq if in fact we decide we can turn this over, including the bulk of the security, to the Iraqis between now and then,” he said.
In Kufa, Moqtada Sadr’s chief spokesperson, Sheikh Fuad al-Tarfi, said the Mehdi Army had taken over administrative buildings “to protect them against looters”.
He urged police to join the Shiite militia to “restore order” in the city.
But chief US administator Bremer said the actions of the Medhi Army showed it had “basically placed itself outside the legal authorities, the coalition and Iraqi officials”.
Sadr “is attempting to establish his authority in the place of the legitimate authority. We will not tolerate this. We will reassert the law and order which the Iraqi people expect,” Bremer told a national security meeting.
With US plans for Iraq in disarray, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, was due to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday.
Russia, one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, was a leading opponent of the war in Iraq, and Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexander Yakovenko gave a foretaste of the talks when he said in televised remarks that the UN was needed there more than ever.
“The UN must have real powers in order to return to Iraq and work effectively there,” he said. — Sapa-AFP
City under siege after violence
Troops clash with Shias