US troops kill eight in Baghdad fighting
American troops battled with Shiite gunmen today in Baghdad, killing at least eight in pre-dawn fighting, the US military said.
Radical Shiite politicians claimed the victims included civilians and accused the government of being too weak to rein in the Americans.
Those allegations add new pressures on a Shiite prime minister already under fire from US critics for failing to achieve national unity.
Elsewhere, an American soldier was killed and four others wounded in an explosion today in Salahuddin province, a mostly Sunni area north of the capital.
The blast occurred hours after dozens of suspected al Qaida fighters launched co-ordinated attacks on police stations in Samarra, a city in Salahuddin province about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
Three people were killed in the attacks, including a policeman, a woman and an 11-year-old girl, an Iraqi official said. He said 14 attackers were captured.
According to the US military, the fighting in Baghdad erupted when a US Army patrol came under fire shortly after midnight from gunmen on rooftops in Shula, a rundown Shiite neighbourhood and stronghold of the Mahdi Army of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Troops called in attack helicopters, which raked the rooftops with automatic weapons fire, US spokesman Lt Col Scott Bleichwehl said.
During the battle, US helicopters from the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade also fired on about a dozen armed militiamen “moving toward coalition forces” in Shula, the military said in a statement.
Bleichwehl said all the dead were “identified as hostile.”
But Iraqi police and hospital officials said the dead included a woman and a young boy.
Sixteen other people were wounded, including four women and three boys in their early teens who had been sleeping on the roofs to escape the broiling summer heat, an official at Noor Hospital in Shula said.
In Najaf, the leader of the pro-Sadr bloc in parliament, Nasser al-Rubaie, claimed 21 civilians had been killed in Shula. He blamed the government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, saying it was “weak and can do nothing in the face of the occupation.”
Although al-Rubaie’s figures appeared exaggerated, US attacks in Shiite neighbourhoods are embarrassing to Maliki because they fuel hostility to his American backers within the Shiite community – the prime minister’s power base.
Those pressures on Maliki are growing at a time when he is under fire from American critics for his government’s inability to forge unity among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
A report released Thursday by US intelligence agencies predicted more turmoil over the next six to 12 months because the country’s political leaders “remain unable to govern effectively.”
The fresh criticism comes only weeks before US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus report to Congress on the state of the country following the US troop buildup this year.
The buildup was aimed at reducing violence so that Iraq’s rival sectarian and ethnic communities could reach power-sharing deals essential for lasting peace.
But Iraq’s political crisis reached a boil this month when the main Sunni bloc pulled out of the government, accusing Maliki of failing to respond to their demands, including the release of security detainees held without charge.
In an interview with the US-funded Alhurra television today, Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi said his bloc withdrew when “we realised that the chance to reform had been lost and we had reached a deadlock with this government.”
Al-Hashemi said believed that a decision by the Sunnis to return to the government was “out of the question.”
“I am afraid, the Shiites are afraid, and the Kurds are afraid,” al-Hashemi said. “We have to dispel these fears. Dispelling the fears occurs through adopting a common national vision...Every side must show their cards and say to the other side these are my reservations about you.”
With the Sunnis estranged, violence is also on the rise in the Shiite south, where rival groups are vying for political power.
Authorities in mostly Shiite province of Muthanna imposed a curfew after an attack on al-Sadr’s offices near the provincial capital Samawah, about 230 miles south-east of Baghdad.
Two of al-Sadr’s offices were demolished after being hit with rocket-propelled grenade fire, police said. The buildings were empty at the time and no casualties were reported, but authorities feared the cleric’s followers might seek retribution.
“Because of the fear that reprisals might take place during Friday prayers, a decision was taken to impose the curfew across the province,” local politician Ahmed Marzuq said.
Elsewhere, the US command said today that Iraqi troops and US Special Forces raided a home in the Hit area, 85 miles west of Baghdad, and seized an al Qaida suspect believed to have shot down an American helicopter in 2004.
The forces detained the suspect and a “second person of interest” in the Wednesday raid, and found an assault rifle as well as identification cards and passports.
US forces also reported killing seven insurgents and detaining 12 others in operations to disrupt al Qaida in central and northern Iraq.
In the biggest raid, troops returned to an area east of Tarmiyah, 30 miles north of Baghdad, where they killed 13 insurgent suspects and captured 12 others a week earlier, US spokesman Lt Col Christopher Garver said.
