Coalition forces raid militia's stronghold
US and Iraqi forces swept into Baghdad’s Sadr City Shiite slum in an early morning raid today, killing four Iraqis, wounding eight and detaining five, police said.
It was the fourth coalition attack in six days on the slum, which is home to the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and suspected of having kidnapped an American soldier last month and taken scores of Iraqi hostages during an attack on a government building in Baghdad on November 14.
The US command said it could not immediately confirm Thursday’s raid.
Police Capt Mohammed Ismail said coalition forces searched houses at about 4:30am and opened fire on a minivan carrying Iraqi workers in the al-Fallah Street area, klling four of them and wounding eight.
Iraqis often pay a small fee to crowd such vehicles and travel early in the morning to sites where they hope to get work as day labourers.
Ismail said the coalition raid also detained five Iraqis.
Later residents of Sadr City gathered around the minivan, which had bullet holes in the windscreen and its sides, and blood stains inside.
“I was surprised by the heavy shooting on our minivan. I was hit badly in my left hand,” said one worker, Ahmed Gatie, 24, as he was treated at Imam Ali hospital. “I can only feed my family when I work. What will happen now?”
Three other patients were lying on hospital beds or being treated, and four bodies were bodies were lying in a morgue attached to the hospital in Sadr City, an east Baghdad grid of streets lined with tumbledown concrete block structures and vacant lots.
Witness Salah Salman, 24, said he took cover when the coalition raid began and his house cae under fire.
Afterward, Salman said, he joined other local residents in helping police carry victims of the attack from the minivan to the morgue and hospital.
The raid came just weeks after Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, had taken on the role of protector of the sprawling Sadr City district by ordering the US military to lift a blockade of the slum.
American forces had sealed the district for several days looking for kidnapped US soldier Ahmed Qusai al-Taayie, a 41-year-old reservist from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
He was visiting his Iraqi wife in Baghdad on October 23 when he was handcuffed and abducted by suspected rogue gunmen from the Mahdi Army.
Al-Sadr is a major political backer of Maliki, who had rejected American demands to disband the heavily armed militias and their death squads that have carried out a brutal campaign of revenge attacks on Iraq’s Sunni minority in a cycle of violence following the February 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine.
But Maliki has looked the other way during the most recent joint US-Iraqi raids, an about-face his aides said was prompted by anger over the US soldier’s abduction and a mass kidnapping carried out by suspected Mahdi Army gunmen.
Dozens of gunmen in police uniforms kidnapped scores of people during the raid on a Ministry of Higher Education office in Baghdad on November 14. The ministry is predominantly Sunni Arab.
That attack was seen as another example of the revenge killings and kidnappings among Iraq’s majority Shiites and minority Sunnis that have left Iraq on the brink of a sectarian civil war.
Yesterday, at least 101 Iraqiswere killed, and the UN reported that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest monthly toll of the war and one that is sure to be eclipsed when November’s dead are counted.
The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq also said that citizens were fleeing the country at a pace of 100,000 each month, and that at least 1.6 million Iraqis have left since the war began in March 2003.
Life for Iraqis, especially in Baghdad and cities and towns in the centre of the country, has become increasingly untenable. Many schools failed to open at all in September, and professionals – especially professors, physicians, politicians and journalists – are falling to sectarian killers at a stunning pace.
Lynchings have been reported as Sunnis and Shiites conduct a merciless campaign of revenge killings. Some Shiite residents in the north Baghdad neighbourhood of Hurriyah claim that militiamen and death squads are holding Sunni captives in warehouses, then slaughtering them at the funerals of Shiites killed in the tit-for-tat murders.
The US military today reported the deaths of three Marines who were killed while fighting in Anbar province, where many Sunni-Arab insurgents are based.
So far this month, 52 American service members have been killed or died.
