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At Least 100 Die as Militia Force Iraqi Troops Out of Town    [

    At Least 23 Dead in Iraq Violence
    By Sudarsan Raghavan and Ellen Knickmeyer
    The Washington Post

    Monday 28 August 2006

    Baghdad - The death toll mounted in Iraq Monday as clashes between Shiite militiamen and U.S.-backed Iraqi forces in a southern city killed at least 23 and injured 70 while a suicide bombing in the capital killed 15, including 8 policemen.

    In Diwaniyah, about 80 miles south of Baghdad, clashes broke out between the Mahdi Army militia of radical, anti-U.S. cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and U.S.-backed Iraqi army soldiers following a raid by Iraqi soldiers in three neighborhoods to root out extremists, news wires reported.

    Details of the fighing there were difficult to confirm, but it appeared from reports to be a significant battle and one of the first major skirmishes between the regular troops and the militia.

    Even the number of casualties varied by source. The Reuters news agency said that a Ministry of Defense spokesman said 50 militia members and 20 soldiers had been killed. An official in Sadr's Baghdad office told Reuters, however, that two militiamen had been killed. The Associated Press quotes Dr. Muhammed Abdul-Muhsen of the city's general hospital who said he had seen 34 bodies-25 soldiers, seven civilians and two militiamen.

    U.S. forces, meanwhile, have lost nine soldiers since Saturday, the military said in press releases, making it a lethal weekend for them as well. Eight of the soldiers were killed by roadside bomb attacks and one by gunfire, according to the brief military statements.

    In all, it was one of the deadliest 24 hours in Iraq in recent weeks and comes amid assertions by the Iraqi government and U.S. military that they are prevailing over extremists fueling the sectarian violence that's gripping the capital . On Sunday, gunmen and bombers claimed at least 69 lives.

    "The violence is in decrease and our security ability is increasing," Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said on CNN's "Late Edition" program Sunday. Multinational forces have created an atmosphere of "reconciliation" in the country, Maliki said, and "Iraq will never be in a civil war."

    Hours after he spoke, at 10:15 a.m. Monday, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at a checkpoint leading into the Ministry of Interior, where Interior Minister Jawad Bolani was scheduled to hold a meeting with police chiefs from Iraq's 18 provinces.

    Many of those injured were coming to the ministry for official business. Three police cars were destroyed in addition to five civilian cars, according to witnesses.

    In Diwaniyah, the fighting between the government troops and militias reportedly broke out Sunday night. Iraqi soldiers were conducting raids looking for militiamembers and weapons in three neighborhoods when they came under fire from rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles, army Capt. Fatik Aied told the Associated Press.

    Aied said the fighting is continuing but spokesman for Sadr said the army had pulled out of the city.

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    At Least 100 Die as Militia Force Iraqi Troops Out of Town
    By Jerome Taylor
    The Independent UK

    Tuesday 29 August 2006

    At least 100 people were killed across Iraq yesterday in a day of intense gun battles and suicide bombings, contradicting US military claims that the security situation in the war-torn nation was improving.

    A total of 34 bodies, including seven civilians and 25 Iraqi government soldiers, were brought into the central hospital in the town of Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, after fighting between government forces and gunmen of the Mehdi Army, a Shia militia loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Fifty militiamen were also killed in the gunfight, according to the Iraqi defence ministry.

    In a separate development, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into the Interior Ministry in Baghdad during the midmorning rush hour, killing 16 people, including 13 policemen, and wounding up to 62.

    On Sunday, a further 60 people were killed in attacks across the country from Kirkuk in the Kurdish-held north to Basra in the south.

    The latest violence was a reminder of how easily Iraq could slip back into the type of endemic sectarian violence that characterised much of the first half of this year after the destruction in February of a Shia shrine in the town of Samarra.

    More than 10,000 Iraqis - the vast majority in Baghdad - have been killed in the past four months alone, a figure that would send shockwaves through the international community were it in any other part of the world.

    The US military admitted that there had been a spike in violence in Baghdad, but insisted that things were improving since US-led forces launched Operation Forward Together last month in an attempt to pacify the capital.

    Maj-Gen William Caldwell, a US military spokesman, said violence in Baghdad had dropped by half since July, and that life was returning to normal in some areas of the capital.

    The British Defence Secretary, Des Browne, echoed such sentiments during a visit to Iraq yesterday to meet key Iraqi politicians including the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

    "I recognise there are continuing challenges and I've seen some violence over this weekend which suggests there's much more work to be done," Mr Browne told a joint news conference with the Iraqi Defence Minister, Abdul Qader Jassim. "But as Prime Minister ?aliki said in an interview this weekend, things are improving and the challenge is to maintain that improvement."

    The intense fighting in Diwaniyah will be of particular concern to British forces stationed in the Shia-dominated south of Iraq. Reports suggested that militiamen had driven government forces out of the city and had set up checkpoints in the suburbs. If the Mehdi Army has pushed the government out of the Shia-dominated city it will be a major snub to Mr Maliki, who has promised to rid Iraq of militias.

    Confronting Mr Sadr's Shia militias was never going to be an easy task. His movement holds 30 parliamentary seats and five cabinet posts, and his militiamen are well-armed and dedicated. The cleric is also undeniably popular among Iraq's Shia majority, particularly the poorer classes.

    In 2004, Mr Sadr led an uprising against the American-led coalition which threatened to draw the post-Saddam government and US military into a bitter conflict with Iraq's Shia while simultaneously trying to subdue what was then an emerging Sunni insurgency. The fighting was only stopped when the head of Iraq's Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, ordered the Mehdi Army fighters to lay down their arms.