Iraqi Shiite Militia Blames US as Car Bombs Kill at Least 11
    By Bassam Sebti and Jonathan Finer
    The Washington Post

    Friday 03 February 2006

    Baghdad - Black-clad members of a Shiite Muslim militia that battled U.S. forces nearly two years ago took to the streets of an eastern Baghdad neighborhood Thursday evening following a pair of car bombings that killed at least 11 people and wounded dozens.

    The blasts - the first of which erupted near a fuel truck, sending a billowing fireball skyward - came minutes apart in the capital's Amin district. Along with several residents, members of the Mahdi Army, which staged two violent uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004, blamed American troops for the attacks, claiming they had not permitted the militia to police the area on its own.

    "We formed two committees to protect the neighborhood because neither the Americans nor the Iraqis are able to do it," said Abu Zahra, 40, a fighter in the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. "They did not allow us and said they would arrest us if they saw us in the streets. And now, this is the result."

    An incident earlier in the day also enraged Sadr's followers in Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite slum in Baghdad named for Sadr's late father. Before dawn, a U.S. helicopter was airlifting soldiers who had just detained a suspected insurgent from the group Ansar al-Sunna when it was fired on and shot back, according to a military spokesman. One woman in a nearby building was killed and three residents were wounded.

    "This is one side escalating things," said Abdul Hadi Darraji, a spokesman for Sadr. "The U.S. forces intend to provoke us, but we'll be patient. Escalating doesn't serve the current political and security situations."

    The attacks came on a day when the military reported the deaths of five U.S. troops in three insurgent attacks Wednesday. Three soldiers were killed on a combat patrol south of Baghdad when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb. Another died from gunshot wounds suffered in southwest Baghdad. And a Marine was killed by small-arms fire during combat operations near the city of Fallujah in Iraq's Sunni Arab-dominated Anbar province.

    In more evidence of the violence plaguing Baghdad, 16 bodies of middle-age men, who had been blindfolded, bound and shot at close range, were found in the city's eastern outskirts, the Associated Press reported.

    On Wednesday in Baghdad, two reporters for the satellite television channel al-Sumariya were kidnapped after a meeting with officials of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's dominant Sunni Arab political organization, police said Thursday.

    The reporters were traveling in a car with two cameramen and a driver when a car without a license plate blocked their vehicle. Men pulled the reporters from their car, dragging a female reporter by her hair, and sped away, according to a manager at the station, who spoke on the condition that he not be named.

    "We are a neutral TV station. We have no enemies," he said.

    Journalists have been victims of a spate of recent attacks, including the Jan. 7 kidnapping of American reporter Jill Carroll, who has not been heard from since a video aired last week that showed her sobbing and clad in a traditional Muslim head scarf. More recently, ABC News anchorman Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt suffered serious head injuries in a roadside bomb attack near the northern city of Taji.

    Also Thursday, U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested a correspondent for Baghdad TV, a subsidiary of the Iraqi Islamic Party. Yasir Husam was detained in a raid on Baghdad's Jihad neighborhood, according to Muhammed Dulaimi, an official with the station. A cameraman for the station was killed by Marines last month during a shootout with insurgents in the western city of Ramadi.

    "U.S. forces are angry with this channel because it reveals the crimes the U.S. forces commit against Iraqi people," Dulaimi said in a telephone interview.

    An Iraqi police captain, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said police "found videos and photos of operations committed by armed men."

    In political developments Thursday, representatives of each of the main blocs that won seats in Iraq's December elections gathered for a rare joint news conference to say negotiations were underway to form a government in which all groups would be represented.

    Leaders of the Shiite religious parties that won the largest share of seats in the Dec. 15 balloting are expected to name their candidate for prime minister in the coming days. Front-runners are the incumbent, Ibrahim Jafari of the Dawa party, and Adel Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country's largest Shiite party.

    "We have reached an agreement to form a national unity government in which all the factions that won in the election will participate for real, not only by name," President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said at the gathering.

    Meanwhile, divergent accounts have emerged of an incident in the fortified Green Zone this week in which a U.S. soldier fired a warning shot into a vehicle carrying the top Canadian diplomat in Iraq. No one was hurt in the incident, which is still under investigation.

    The U.S. military has said the Canadian car did not stop when signaled to do so by the soldier, who then opened fire. But an account of the incident provided to Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper by a passenger in the car said that no signal was given, that the Canadian driver had taken a course in driving inside the Green Zone, and that he was traveling so slowly when the shots were fired that the car left no skid marks when he applied the brakes.

    "Our officials are clear that they were operating within the rules," said Stephen Harper, Canada's prime minister-designate, according to the newspaper.

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    Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.