State of emergency declared in Baghdad

The fighting along Haifa Street near the Green Zone, the site of the US and British embassies as well as the Iraqi government, was unusual in its scope and intensity.

There have, however, routinely been clashes along the thoroughfare, making it so dangerous that a sign at one Green Zone exit checkpoint warns drivers against using the street.

As the state of emergency was announced in the capital, a car bomb ripped through a market and nearby petrol station in the increasingly volatile southern city of Basra today, killing at least five people and wounding 18, including two policemen, police said.

A bomb also struck a Sunni mosque in the town of Hibhib northeast of Baghdad, killing 10 worshippers and wounding 15 in the same town where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed earlier this month, police said.

At least 19 other deaths were reported in Baghdad.

Throughout the morning today, Iraqi and US military forces clashed with attackers who were armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles and fired from alleys and doorways along Haifa Street.

Four Iraqi soldiers and three policemen were wounded in the fighting, said police Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said.

The region was sealed and Iraqi and US forces conducted house-to-house searches.

Defence Ministry official Major General Abdul-Aziz Mohamed Jassim said nobody can go out during the curfew, which the prime minister’s office initially said would last from 2pm local time today until 6am tomorrow but later shortened to end at 5pm local time today.

The state of emergency includes a ban on carrying weapons and gives Iraqi security forces broader arrest powers, Jassim said.

“The state of emergency and curfew came in the wake of today’s clashes to let the army work freely to chase militants and to avoid casualties among civilians,” he said.

“They will punish all those who have weapons with them and they can shoot them if they feel that they are danger.”

Gunmen also attacked a group of worshippers marching from Sadr City, the Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad, to the Buratha mosque on the other side of the city to protest a suicide attack a week ago on the revered Shiite shrine. At least one marcher was killed and four were wounded, Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said.

The US military reported that two Multi-National Division-Baghdad soldiers were killed this morning when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb southeast of the capital. Earlier in the day, a separate military statement reported that two US Marines were killed during combat in the volatile Anbar province in separate attacks on Wednesday and Thursday, and a soldier died elsewhere in a non-combat incident on Wednesday.

The deaths raised to at least 2,517 members of the US military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003.

The new security measures came as Maliki sought to rein in unrelenting insurgent and sectarian violence. He launched a massive security operation in Baghdad 10 days ago, deploying tens of thousands of troops who flooded the city, snarling traffic with hundreds of checkpoints.

While violence had diminished somewhat, the outbreak of fighting on Haifa Street and in the Dora neighbourhood apparently prompted Malaki to declare the state of emergency even as prayer services were in progress today, sending many residents scrambling homewards to beat the curfew.

Also today, police said they found the bodies of five men who apparently were victims of a mass kidnapping from a factory on Wednesday. The bodies, which showed signs of torture and had their hands and legs bound, were floating in a canal in northern Baghdad, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.

A police raid on a farm yesterday freed 17 of the captives, who were believed to have been taken by Sunni extremists as they boarded company buses for the trip home after work at the al-Nasr General Complex, a former military plant about 20 miles north of Baghdad that now makes metal doors, windows and pipes.

There has been rampant sectarian violence in the region, where tit-for-tat kidnappings and revenge killings are common, but nothing on the scale of Wednesday’s abduction. The al-Nasr plant is between Baghdad and Taji, a predominantly Sunni Arab area.

Initial reports said as many as 85 people, including women who had taken their children to work, were taken. But Industry Minister Fowzi Hariri told state-run Iraqiya TV yesterday that 64 people were abducted and two of those were killed trying to escape.

Thirty people, mainly women and children, were freed shortly after the kidnapping, leaving 15 still believed in captivity.

The Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organisation for insurgent groups, including al-Qaida in Iraq, claimed in an internet posting that it had killed 81 workers who were “building a new American base".

It was unclear if the group was referring to the factory kidnap victims, and the authenticity of the statement could not be verified, although it was posted on a website used by insurgents to post statements and videos. The same group claimed it kidnapped and beheaded two US soldiers last weekend.

At least 25 people also have been killed gangland-style in the northern city of Mosul this week, with residents gunned down in ones and twos and bodies found scattered throughout Iraq’s third-largest city.

Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, has a mixed Kurdish and Sunni Arab population and a tradition of bad blood. The Kurds, who are largely Sunni Muslim but not Arab, have formed a prosperous autonomous region nearby after decades of oppression and mass killings under the Sunni Arab minority that ran Iraq until Saddam Hussein was ousted three years ago.

Also today, the US military said it killed four foreign insurgents in a raid north of Fallujah. Two of the dead men had 15lb suicide bombs strapped to their bodies. The military said an insurgent thought to be an Iraqi also was killed in the raid, which was launched on information from a suspected arrested in the region in previous days.

Separately, the military said, it detained a senior leader of al Qaida in Iraq and three other suspected insurgents on Monday during raids northeast of Baghdad, near where al Qaida chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a US air raid earlier this month.

In other violence today, police said:

- Gunmen killed an engineer who worked at Baghdad airport in a drive-by-shooting in western Baghdad.

- Police discovered the bodies of four men who had been handcuffed and shot. The dead men, all between 30 and 25, were found in the north Baghdad district of Kazimiyah.

- A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol in the Dora region of southern Baghdad killed a police officer and wounded four others.

- Police found the body of a man who had been shot in the head and chest in central Baghdad just after dawn.

- The bodies of two women in their mid-20s who had been shot in the head were found in an eastern Baghdad drainage canal.

- Police found the bodies of four bullet-riddled and handcuffed men wearing civilian clothes in the northern Baghdad suburb of Kazimiyah. A roadside bomb also exploded in the predominantly Shiite area, sparking a fire in two discount clothing stores.