Iraqi security forces, backed by the United States military, swept into a town south of Baghdad at dawn on Monday after reports that Sunni militants had kidnapped as many as 100 Shi’ites there.
But residents and Sunni clerics said the reports had been grossly exaggerated by government officials bent on re-establishing control in the lawless region the US military has called the “Triangle of Death” because it has become a stronghold of the militant Sunni insurgency.
An Associated Press (AP) photographer joined hundreds of Iraqi police who entered Madain, deploying on rooftops and moving through streets in vehicles and on foot. There was no resistance and no hostages were found in the agricultural town of about 1 000 families, evenly divided between Shi’ites and Sunnis.
National Security Minister Qassim Dawoud warned Parliament on Sunday of attempts to draw the country into sectarian war.
Addressing legislators on Monday, he pledged to “chase down terror everywhere”.
He said Iraqi forces discovered rooms full of mines, ammunition and car-bomb-making equipment in Madain. Six completed car bombs were recovered and were being diffused, he said. A number of suspected insurgents were also detained.
A correspondent for Al-Arabiya television, embedded with Iraqi forces, reported that six Iraqi police and special forces brigades were participating in the operation in Madain.
Less than 200 American troops were providing air cover, medical evacuation services and a quick reaction force, which would only be sent in if needed, the US military said.
Nervous residents peeped through their windows, or gave quick waves from their doors, but streets were largely deserted.
Iraqi police and special forces searched farms and orchards on the outskirts of town. At one farm, they found stolen cars, bomb-making equipment and instructions on how to use weapons, the AP photographer said.
Rumours
The confusion over what happened in Madain illustrated how quickly rumours spread in a country of deep ethnic and sectarian divides, where the threat of violence is all too real. Poor telephone communications and the difficulty of travelling between towns because of daily attacks on the roads make it difficult even for government officials to establish the facts.
A defence ministry official, Haidar Khayon, said early on Sunday that Iraqi forces raided the town, freed about 15 Shi’ite families and captured five hostage-takers in a skirmish with light gunfire.
He said there were no casualties in what officials had described as a tense stand-off in which Sunni militants were threatening to kill their Shi’ite captives if all other Shi’ites did not leave the town.
Iraq’s most influential Shi’ite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged government officials to resolve the crisis peacefully, his office said on Sunday.
By the end of the day, however, Iraqi officials had produced no hostages, and Iraqi military officials and police who had given information about the troubles in Madain could not be reached for further details.
Sheikh Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, a spokesperson for the Association of Muslim Scholars, an organisation of Sunni clerics, denied hostages had been taken in Madain.
“This news is completely untrue,” he told al-Jazeera television on Sunday.
The country’s most-feared insurgent group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, also denied there had been any hostage-taking in a statement on Sunday on an Islamic website known for its militant content.
The group, headed by the Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said the incident was a fabrication by the “enemies of God” to justify a military attack on Madain aimed at Sunnis.
An AP television cameraman toured the town on Sunday morning and saw no sign of unrest. People were going about their business normally, shops were open and tea houses were full, he said.
Residents contacted by telephone also said everything was normal in Madain.
Chain of events
Whatever happened there began on Thursday when Shi’ite leaders claimed Sunni militants had seriously damaged a town mosque in a bomb attack. The next day, the Shi’ites said, masked militants drove through town, capturing Shi’ite residents and threatening to kill them unless all Shi’ites left.
Shiite leaders and government officials initially estimated 35 to 100 people were taken hostage, but residents disputed the claim, with some saying they had seen no evidence any hostages were taken.
Security forces began raiding sites on Saturday in search of those abducted, Dawoud said.
The distracting events surrounding Madain erupted as Prime Minister-designate Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shi’ite leader, was trying to entice members of Iraq’s Sunni minority into a new Cabinet, as a government is formed after the January 30 national elections.
Sunnis make up about 20% of Iraq’s estimated 26-million population, but were dominant under Saddam Hussein. Since US-led forces drove him from power two years ago, the disempowered Sunnis are believed to form the backbone of the ongoing insurgency, fearing a loss of influence to majority Shi’ites.
At least 33 people died over the weekend in insurgent violence elsewhere in Iraq, including four US soldiers and a 28-year-old American aid worker identified as Marla Ruzicka, the founder of a group that was trying to determine the number of civilian casualties in Iraq.
On Monday, two Iraqi police officers were killed and six injured when a roadside bomb exploded as their two patrol vehicles drove through Basra in southern Iraq, said police Captain Alaa Hasan.
In northern Iraq, an explosion set by insurgents heavily damaged an oil pipeline near Beiji, the country’s largest refinery, officials said.
No injuries were reported, but the blast sent burning oil floating across the surface of the nearby Tigris River. Black smoke and flames shot high into the air, engulfing parts of a tall railroad bridge that passes over the river. The bridge is no longer used because of damage that it suffered during the Iraq war.
In oil-rich Iraq, the pipeline once exported oil to Turkey, but many terrorist attacks have heavily damaged the line, and it is now only used to send oil to a local power station. — Sapa-AP
Associated Press writers Jamie Tarabay, Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sameer N Yacoub contributed to this report from Baghdad