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Iraq cleric vows fight to death vs. US
A radical Shiite cleric vowed to fight to the death as his loyalists battled U.S. troops for a fifth straight day Monday, and bombings in Sunni regions outside Baghdad — including a failed attempt to assassinate a deputy governor — killed at least 10 Iraqis.
About 1.8 million barrels per day, or 90 percent of Iraq's exports, move through Basra, and any shutdown in the flow of Iraq's main money earner would badly hamper reconstruction efforts.
Explosions and gunfire were heard throughout the holy Shiite city of Najaf, south of the capital, the main scene of fighting between U.S. troops and the militiamen. As U.S. helicopters hovered overhead, troops tried to drive militiamen from a vast cemetery they have used as a base, and a U.S. tank rolled within 400 yards of Najaf's holiest site.
Seven militants were killed since Sunday evening in Najaf, an al-Sadr official said.
A senior U.S. military official in Baghdad estimated Monday that 360 insurgents died in Najaf in the first four days of the battle, although al-Sadr's militia insists the toll has been far lower.
Five U.S. troops have been killed in Najaf, according to the military, and the U.S. official said 19 had been wounded. Najaf police chief Brig. Ghalib al-Jazaari said about 20 police have been killed in the violence since Thursday.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have been trying to rein in al-Sadr to prevent the current violence from expanding on the scale of a widespread revolt his militia launched in April, fighting for two months until a series of truces brought a relative calm.
Al-Sadr on Monday vowed to keep up the battle, rejecting calls a day earlier from interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi for the militiamen to stop fighting.
"I will continue fighting," al-Sadr told reporters. "I will remain in Najaf city until the last drop of my blood has been spilled."
"Resistance will continue and increase day by day," he said. "Our demand is for the American occupation to get out of Iraq. We want an independent, democratic, free country."
At the same time, violence in the insurgency-plagued Sunni regions of Iraq continued. A suicide attacker detonated a station wagon packed with explosives Monday outside the home of Diyala province's deputy governor, Aqil Hamid al-Adili, killing six policemen guarding his home.
Al-Adili was wounded and taken to a military medical facility after the blast in Balad Ruz, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad. The explosion shattered windows and blew doors off their hinges on the house, wounding a total 17 people — including al-Adili's 9-year-old son, Police Brig. Daoud Mahmoud said.
It was the latest in a campaign of insurgent attacks targeting officials in Iraq's new government — seen as cooperatine with Americans.
Also Monday, a roadside bomb blew up next to a bus on a main street in the town of Khalidiyah, 70 miles west of Baghdad, killing four passengers and wounding four others, officials said.
The military reported Monday that a U.S. Marine was killed in action Sunday in Anbar province, a center of Sunni insurgent violence. The death brought to at least 927 the number of American servicemembers who have died in Iraq.
The Shiite violence began Thursday in Najaf after the truces reached in June collapsed. During the two-month uprising in April, U.S. commanders vowed to "capture or kill" al-Sadr, but later tacitly agreed to let Iraqi authorities deal with the cleric.
Even amid the fighting, troops appeared to still be keeping a hands-off policy with al-Sadr himself. The U.S. officer in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said al-Sadr "is not an objective; we are not actively pursuing him." Much of the fighting has centered on the vast cemetery near the Imam Ali Shrine. U.S. forces using helicopter gunships launched a renewed offensive Sunday to drive militants out of the cemetery after claiming two days earlier to have secured the area in some of the fiercest fighting. On Monday, a U.S. tank approached within about 400 yards of the shrine compound, the closest the military has come to it in the fighting. Mahdi Army militiamen in Baghdad kidnapped a senior Iraqi policeman, Brig. Raed Mohammed Khudair, who is responsible for all police patrols in eastern Baghdad, said Col. Adnan Abdel Rahman, an Interior Ministry spokesman. In a video broadcast on Al-Jazeera television, militants demanded the government release all Mahdi Army prisoners in exchange for Khudair, whom they snatched Sunday. The Interior Ministry clamped a nighttime curfew Monday on Sadr City, a Shiite neighborhood in eastern Baghdad where U.S. troops and al-Sadr militiamen have also been fighting. In Basra, masked al-Sadr followers patrolled some main streets Monday and set up checkpoints. No Iraqi police or British troops could be seen, witnesses said. The Mahdi Army threatened Monday to take over local government buildings in Basra if U.S. troops did not leave Najaf, and also said they would target oil pipelines and ports in southern Iraq. A senior official with Iraq's South Oil Company said said the southern oil fields stopped pumping oil Monday after the threats, though oil already in storage tanks at Basra's port was still being loaded onto tankers. Iraq's defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, accused neighboring Iran of helping arm the Shiite militiamen. "There are Iranian-made weapons that have been found in the hands of criminals in Najaf who received these weapons from across the Iranian border," Shaalan told the Arab-language television network al-Arabiya. Iran has denied interfering in Iraq, though many believe it is funneling money to a range of Shiite groups to increase its influence. Iran confirmed Monday that Faridoun Jihani, the Iranian consul to the Iraqi city of Karbala, had been kidnapped and said it was trying to win his release. Jihani's kidnappers, in a video released Saturday, accused Iran of meddling in Iraq's affairs. Scores of other foreigners have been kidnapped as leverage to force foreign troops and businesses from the country. In an video posted on the Internet, militants beheaded a hostage identified only as a Bulgarian. Two Bulgarian truck drivers were kidnapped June 29, and the beheaded body of one of the drivers was found in mid July and a tape was released showing his death. |
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