The United States military fired rockets at a target near a hospital in eastern Baghdad on Saturday, wounding 20 people. No patients were wounded at the hospital in the Sadr City stronghold of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but 20 people at the scene of the blasts were wounded.
More than 900 people have been killed in clashes between militiamen and security forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City, which broke out last month, a senior Iraqi official told reporters on Wednesday. ”There were 925 martyrs in Sadr City and 2 605 others have been wounded”, said Tehseen Sheikhly, a spokesperson for the government’s Baghdad security plan.
Militants bombarded Baghdad’s Green Zone with rockets on Sunday, taking advantage of the cover of a blinding dust storm to launch one of the heaviest strikes in weeks on the fortified compound. The strikes appeared to defy a renewed call for a ceasefire by Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, which has seen many of his masked gunmen leave the streets of the Sadr City slum.
Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr pulled back from confrontation with the government on Friday, asking his followers to continue to observe a shaky ceasefire and not to battle government troops. Sadr said his recent threat of ”open war” was directed only at United States forces, not the Iraqi government.
Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Saturday threatened an ”open war” against the Iraqi government unless it halted a crackdown by Iraqi and United States security forces on his followers. The spectre of a full-scale uprising by Sadr sharply raises the stakes in his confrontation with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
United States and Iraqi forces killed 13 gunmen in clashes and air strikes overnight in the Baghdad stronghold of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who said the US would remain his enemy until the ”last drop of my blood”. Authorities eased a blockade on Saturday in the Sadr City district of eastern Baghdad that had trapped residents in the slum for two weeks.
Iraq on Wednesday marked the fifth anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s iron-fisted regime with the nation still in turmoil, the capital under curfew and a surge of deadly violence in the Shi’ite bastion of Sadr City. Iraqi officials said three mortar rounds slammed into Sadr City, killing at least seven people and wounding 24 others.
Fierce fighting raged on Tuesday as United States and Iraqi forces battled heavily armed Shi’ite militiamen in their Baghdad bastion of Sadr City for a third straight day, a correspondent and witnesses said. They said fierce clashes erupted soon after midnight as American tanks attempted to push into Sadr City.
Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will consult senior religious leaders and disband his Mehdi Army militia if they instruct him to, a senior aide said on Monday. The surprise announcement was the first time Sadr has proposed dissolving the Mehdi Army, one of the principle actors in Iraq’s five-year-old conflict.
Clashes between militiamen and United States forces in the Iraqi capital’s Shi’ite bastion of Sadr City killed at least 20 people and wounded 52 others on Sunday, Iraqi security and medical officials said. Officials from Iraq’s security and defence ministries said women and children were among the dead and wounded.
Gunmen kidnapped 42 university students near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Sunday, police said, in one of the biggest mass abductions in the country in many months. ”Gunmen stopped two buses in a village south of Mosul,” said Khalid Abdul-Sattar, police spokesperson for Nineveh province. The group was freed hours after being kidnapped.
The number of Iraqis killed in March climbed to 1 082, mostly civilians, the highest monthly figure since August, amid a spike in violence driven by clashes between Shi’ite militiamen and security forces, officials said on Tuesday. The figure confirms a reversal of the trend of gradually decreasing violence since June.
United States air strikes and military assaults have killed 41 ”criminals” in Baghdad, including 25 who died when an alleged mortar team was bombed, the US military announced on Monday. The killings occurred on Sunday in eastern and north-eastern Baghdad where US and Iraqi forces have been battling the Mehdi Army militia
Militants loyal to Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr clashed with Iraqi security forces throughout Iraq’s southern oil hub of Basra for a second day on Wednesday. A health official said 40 people had been killed and 200 wounded in the first day of the clashes, including civilians, gunmen and Iraqi security forces.
A wave of attacks across Iraq on Sunday killed 51 people, while insurgents fired a barrage of mortars at Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, sending United States embassy staff scurrying into bunkers. The deadliest attack was in the city of Mosul where a suicide bomber crashed an explosives-laden truck into an Iraqi army base.
A suicide attack near a Shi’ite shrine killed at least 36 people on Monday in the central Iraqi city of Karbala, a health official said. The attack came as United States Vice-President Dick Cheney visited Baghdad on a surprise trip and met several US and Iraqi leaders to discuss the recent improvement in security across the country.
United States Vice-President Dick Cheney, an architect of the US-led invasion of Iraq, made an unannounced visit to Baghdad on Monday to assess the success of a troop build-up five years after the war began. Cheney arrived as Republican candidate John McCain, who will be the Republican choice in November’s presidential election, was meeting Iraqi leaders.
No image available
/ 13 February 2008
Negotiators have struck a deal to release two CBS News journalists missing, believed kidnapped, in Iraq and they could be free in hours, a leading Shi’ite militia group and the United States military said on Wednesday. Police in Basra said the men, a British journalist and an interpreter, were seized from a city centre hotel.
No image available
/ 6 December 2007
Al-Qaeda Sunni Arab militants remain a dangerous foe in Iraq despite a decline in violence, the commander of United States forces said on Thursday, a day after the deadliest bombing in Baghdad since September. ”We have to be careful not to get feeling too successful,” General David Petraeus told reporters.
No image available
/ 21 October 2007
United States forces killed 49 ”criminals” in fierce fighting with militants in Baghdad’s Shi’ite stronghold of Sadr City on Sunday during a raid targeting an Iranian-linked insurgent. Medics at four hospitals confirmed 17 dead, including a boy and a girl, but US military spokesperson Major Winfield Danielson said there were no civilian casualties and no reports of American losses.
A United States air strike killed about 25 suspected Iraqi militants linked to Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias on Friday and another 12 al-Qaeda fighters were killed in separate raids, the US military said. US troops said they were engaged in a heavy firefight west of Baquba, capital of volatile Diyala province north of Baghdad, during a dawn raid.
Iraq’s radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Wednesday ordered his Mehdi Army militia to suspend its activities for six months in a bid to reorganise the militant group. ”I direct the Mehdi Army to suspend all its activities for six months until it is restructured in a way that helps honour the principles for which it is formed,” Sadr said in a statement.
Local authorities began evacuating hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from the Iraqi city of Karbala on Tuesday as a battle raged between Iraqi security forces and gunmen near two of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest shrines. A senior security source in Baghdad said 25 people had been killed, mostly police officers.