14 Killed in new Iraq violence

Gunmen screeched through a marketplace in southwestern Baghdad, spraying bullets into food and clothing stalls and killing three Sunni Muslim shopkeepers, a police officer said.

Another drive-by shooting targeted four guards for the Iraqi finance ministry, killing one of them.

In Mahaweel, about 35 miles south of Baghdad, more gunmen killed a Shiite cleric and his son as they were heading to a nearby Shiite shrine, police said.

Attackers shot dead a defence ministry employee on his way to work south of Baghdad, and a provincial council worker was injured in an assassination attempt in Hillah. Police said a parked car bomb killed a woman and wounded 13 people in an outdoor market in the same city, about 60 miles south of Baghdad.

The sectarian attacks continued despite a major new drive to tame Baghdad. The Iraqi army reported killing 30 militants in a firefight late last night in a Sunni insurgent stronghold in the centre of the city, just to the north of the heavily fortified Green Zone.

Prime minister Nouri Maliki, speaking only hours earlier at a ceremony marking the 85th anniversary of the Iraqi army, announced his intention for the relentless and open-ended bid to crush militant fighters bedeviling Baghdad.

Hassan al-Suneid, a key aid and member of Maliki’s Dawa Party, said the Iraqi leader had committed 20,000 soldiers to the operation that would call upon American troops and airpower only when needed.

A stern Maliki told the nation the operation in Baghdad would continue “until all goals are achieved and security is ensured for all citizens.

“We are fully aware that implementing the plan will lead to some harassment for all beloved Baghdad residents, but we are confident they fully understand the brutal terrorist assault we all face.”

State television said eight militants, including five Sudanese fighters, were captured Saturday in the battle near Haifa Street, a Sunni insurgent stronghold on the west bank of the Tigris, where police reported finding the bodies of 27 torture victims dumped earlier in the day.

Al-Suneid, who is also a member of parliament, said the new drive to free Baghdad from the grip of sectarian violence would focus initially on Sunni insurgent strongholds in western Baghdad.

Sunnis were likely to cry foul, given that a large measure of today’s violence in Baghdad is the work of Shiite militias, loyal to al-Maliki’s key political backer, Muqtada al-Sadr.

Also today, the US military announced that 88 suspects were captured in American and Iraqi raids last week, and a weapons cache used for assembling improvised explosive devices was destroyed. Sixty-nine of those suspects were released after questioning, the military said in a statement.

In the new Baghdad operation, an Iraqi army general said commanders of the force would operate independently, a sharp break with Iraqi military tradition of heavy central control, and would be held individually responsible for failed operations.

Any armed person in the streets faced automatic detention, he said, and would be shot if offering resistance, said the general.

Al-Suneid and Maliki insisted that this drive to contain militants, as opposed to a largely ineffective joint operation with the Americans in the second half of last year, would succeed because it would be solely in the hands of Iraqi commanders who have been promised American backup and airpower if they call for it.

However, US political and military officials – in a message of congratulation on Army Day – tempered Iraqi claims that they were acting in full independence.

“As stated by the prime minister today, MNF-I (US forces) will provide appropriate assistance as determined by Iraqi and coalition (American) field commanders, for the implementation of the new plan for securing Baghdad and its surrounding environs,” said the statement from US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and overall American commander Gen. George W Casey.

Al-Suneid said US president George W Bush signed off on the plan when he and Maliki spoke by video conference for nearly two hours on Thursday. The two leaders began formulating the operation during a November summit in Amman, Jordan.

Bush was widely reported to be planning to send at least 9,000 additional American forces to the capital from outside Iraq as part of his long-awaited strategy revisions in the fourth year of a war in which more than 3,000 American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi’s have died.

Last summer the US military and Iraqi army flooded the capital with 12,000 additional troops, but by October, the US military spokesman said the operation had not met expectations and the situation was disheartening.

The last half of 2006 was one of the most violent periods in the centre and west of the country since the 2003 US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. The US deah toll in the capital spiked with the presence of extra American troops on the street during Operation Together Forward II, which has been supplanted by the new Iraqi-dominated drive to cleanse the capital of militant fighters.

In last year’s joint drive to eradicated militants, the Iraqi army failed to send much of the promised troop-strength, making it impossible to secure neighbourhoods after they were cleared of insurgent and militia fighters by American forces.