New York Times
May 16, 2007
BAGHDAD, May 16 — Sprawling street battles between militia gunmen and Iraqi security forces erupted in three cities in Iraq on Wednesday on a day of wide-ranging violence that underscored the grave security situation across much of Iraq.
In the northern city of Mosul, more than 200 Sunni Arab insurgents launched a sophisticated attack on several targets using suicide car bombers, rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles and improvised bombs, said Maj. Gen. Watheq al-Hamdani, the top police commander in Mosul. Four police officers died in the fighting, while 14 others were wounded along with 16 civilians, General Hamdani said.
The attack began at dusk when gunmen tried to storm the main provincial jail, the commander said. When police forces responded, the insurgents attacked them with six suicide car bombs and 14 bombs planted on surrounding roads.
As the police and insurgents fought near the prison, gunmen also attacked the houses of General Hamdani and Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of Mosul Province and one of the senior members of a leading Kurdish political party, the police commander said. Neither men was wounded in the attacks.
Gunmen also fired on a woman and her child in an eastern neighborhood, killing the woman and severely wounding the child, although it was unclear whether the shooting was related to the siege, said Gen. Said Ahmad al-Jibouri, a spokesman for the Mosul police.
Insurgents also used two car bombs to destroy a bridge in Badush, about 15 miles west of Mosul, and five prisoners facing terrorism charges escaped from the jail there, killing two prison guards in the process, Brig. Gen. Mohammad al-Waga said.
The authorities in Mosul imposed a round-the-clock curfew and blockaded five bridges that span the Tigris River, which bisects the city, the general said.
Earlier in the day, in the southern city of Diwaniya, scores of militia fighters loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Mokatada al-Sadr fought running street battles against Iraqi soldiers as government security forces swept into militia strongholds as part of a government crackdown, local officials said.
At least 11 people — eight civilians, two police officers and one solider — were wounded in the fighting, which raged for seven hours and by some official estimates involved as many as 200 militia fighters, police and army commanders said. As the clashes worsened, the provincial governor moved his family to safety in Iran, a police commander said.
According to local government officials, the fighting was set off by the recent arrests of several members of Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia in Diwaniya, about 110 miles south of the capital. But the fighting tapped into the historic power struggle between Mr. Sadr’s loyalists and supporters of a rival Shiite party, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, which controls the government of Diwaniya Province and its police force.
Mahdi Army fighters have occasionally battled members of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council’s armed wing, the Badr Organization. But provincial and tribal officials said the fighting on Wednesday was mostly between Mahdi gunmen and members of the Iraqi Army’s Eighth Division, which is not considered to be a pawn of the provincial leadership and the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council.
“The market is closed and people are afraid that things might escalate,” Sheik Hussein al-Shaalan, head of a tribe in Diwaniya and a secular member of Parliament, said in an interview late Wednesday.
News agencies reported that similar clashes, pitting Iraqi police against Mahdi Army fighters angry about the arrest of two of their members, broke out late Tuesday in Nasiriya, about 120 miles southeast of Diwaniya, and continued into the early morning hours on Wednesday. At least nine Iraqis were killed and 75 wounded in the fighting, The Associated Press reported.
Few other regions across Iraq were untouched by violence on Wednesday.
In Baghdad, a volley of 10 mortar bombs struck the Green Zone, killing two people and wounding at least 10, The A.P. reported, quoting Lou Fintor, the spokesman for the American embassy.
Also in the Iraqi capital on Wednesday, a roadside bomb exploded in the Mansour neighborhood, killing one civilian and wounding two; another bomb exploded in Sheik Omar Street in the city center, killing one person and wounding three; gunmen killed a police colonel in the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Amariya; an insurgent lobbed a hand grenade in Mustansriya Square, in central Baghdad, wounding four people; and at least 30 corpses were found dumped on the streets, the ministry official said.
In Diyala Province, insurgents fired at a police brigadier’s house in Baquba, killing three police officers and wounding two, according to a police commander in the city. A soldier was killed by a suicide bomber who detonated himself at a military checkpoint in a western neighborhood of the city, an Army commander said.
In Ghalbia, a town in eastern Diyala Province, gunmen stopped a bus traveling from Iraqi Kurdistan and kidnapped 21 passengers, all men, according to a police commander in Baquba. The victims were taken to a western Baquba neighborhood known to be a stronghold of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the official said.
Police officials in Diyala also said the number of victims in Tuesday’s suicide car bomb attack in Abu Saida, near the town of Muqdadiya, rose to 36 dead and 64 wounded. They said the bomber was driving a truck and had combined the explosives with cylinders filled with chlorine gas that he had concealed beneath palm fronds. The authorities in Diyala had reported 20 dead in the attack on Tuesday but the death count rose because insurgents shelled the bomb site, both before and after the attack, with about 35 mortar bombs, the police in Abu Saida said.
In Falluja, west of Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated himself at a checkpoint in an area controlled by the Abu Issa tribe, killing seven tribal members, according to a senior tribal leader known as Abu Marwaan. The Abu Issa tribe is among numerous Sunni Arab tribes in Anbar Province that have taken a public, militant stand against the insurgents of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
In Riyadh, a town in western Kirkuk Province, two top provincial officials were killed by a bomb planted in the roadway, Capt. Saad Abdullah of the Iraqi police said.
A truck hauling concrete between Kirkuk and Baghdad was stopped by insurgents, who killed three occupants and kidnapped two, according to Brig. Sarhad Kader, the spokesman for the Kirkuk police force. Insurgents also attacked a medical center in the village of Yankija, south of Kirkuk, killing a member of the medical staff, Brigadier Kader said.
A man was killed and another wounded in a drive-by shooting on the road between Baghdad and Hilla, south of the capital, police officials in Karbala said.