Baghdad fighting 'leaves 18 dead'

[WUOrevolt]

Baghdad fighting 'leaves 18 dead'

The Mehdi Army controls the area around the mosque
At least 18 Iraqis have died in clashes between US troops and militants loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr at a Baghdad mosque, Iraqi sources report.
The US military said it was investigating the reports, which came from Iraqi police, medical sources and Mr Sadr's aides.

A militant spokesman said those killed were worshipping at the time.

Iraqi security forces earlier found 30 bodies - all of them beheaded - near the town of Baquba.

'Unarmed'

In Baghdad, an aide to Mr Sadr accused the US of killing unarmed people at the mosque.

"The American forces went into Mustafa mosque at prayers and killed more than 20 worshippers," Hazim al-Araji told Reuters news agency, citing a larger death toll than the 18 counted by medical sources.

AFP news agency said residents close to the scene reported hearing gunfire and ambulances, while black-clad members of Mr Sadr's Mehdi Army could be seen in the streets.

Earlier, in the Shia city of Najaf, unidentified assailants fired a mortar at the home of Mr Sadr, injuring a child and at least one guard.

Grim find

The headless bodies were found at a roadside near Mullah Eid, a village to the south-west of Baquba, Iraqi security officials said.


Sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni has plagued the area around Baquba since the bombing of a Shia shrine in the city of Samarra in February.

The discovery came shortly after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested that the US could pull significant numbers of troops out of Iraq this year, depending on the security situation.

There are currently about 133,000 US troops in Iraq. The Pentagon is reportedly aiming to cut that number to about 100,000 by the end of 2006.

Residents in Mullah Eid found the bodies by a roadside close to the village and reported their discovery to Iraqi authorities, an Iraqi army commander said.

Brig Saman Talabani told the Associated Press news agency he sent a detachment of soldiers, accompanied by medics from the nearby town of Diyala, to investigate the scene.

All of those killed were thought to be men. Many had also been shot, officials said.

Earlier on Sunday police in Baghdad said they had found at least 13 bodies, some of which had been handcuffed and shot.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4847638.stm

[Janus]

More...

BBC News

At least 16 people have been killed in a raid on a mosque in Baghdad where militants loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr were based, reports say.
Aides to Mr Sadr say US forces led the raid on a mosque, while the US says Iraqi troops ran it with US support.

"No mosques were entered or damaged during this operation," the US military said in a statement.

In a second raid, US troops arrested more than 40 Interior Ministry staff said to be guarding a secret prison.

Earlier on Sunday, Iraqi security forces found 30 bodies - many of them beheaded - near the town of Baquba.

'Unarmed'

In Baghdad, an aide to Mr Sadr accused the US of killing unarmed people at the mosque.

"The American forces went into Mustafa mosque at prayers and killed more than 20 worshippers," Hazim al-Araji told Reuters news agency.

But the US military statement denied that any troops had entered the mosque and said the US special forces troops were on hand only as advisers to the Iraqi troops.

"Iraqi Special Operations Forces conducted a twilight raid in the Aadhamiya neighbourhood in northeast Baghdad to disrupt a terrorist cell responsible for conducting attacks on Iraqi security and Coalition Forces and kidnapping Iraqi civilians in the local area," the statement said.

It said 16 people had been killed. Iraqi police said 22 had died.

AFP news agency said residents close to the scene reported hearing gunfire and ambulances, while black-clad members of Mr Sadr's Mehdi Army could be seen in the streets.

Earlier, in the predominantly Shia city of Najaf, unidentified assailants fired a mortar at the home of Mr Sadr, injuring a child and at least one guard.

Secret bunker

There are conflicting reports about the raid on the Interior Ministry building in Baghdad.

A US source said American and Iraqi forces had detained 41 Interior Ministry personnel who had been guarding a secret bunker complex in the building.

But a senior Interior Ministry official denied that ministry staff had been arrested.

AP news agency reported that some 10 Iraqi policemen were held after the 17 prisoners were discovered in the facility.

A deputy interior minister, Major General Ali Ghalib, said the policemen were released when the Americans realised the prisoners were being held legitimately.

Mr Ghalib said the prisoners were of Sudanese origin, and were being held for "violating residency laws".

According to AP, Mr Ghalib said US troops "transferred the Sudanese detainees to another location and they later released the policemen after they had determined that the detention of the Sudanese was legal".

The US military has yet to comment on the reports.

Grim find

The headless bodies were found at a roadside near Mullah Eid, a village to the south-west of Baquba, Iraqi security officials said.
Sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis has plagued the area around Baquba since the bombing of a Shia shrine in the city of Samarra in February.

All of those killed were thought to be men. Many had also been shot, officials said.

Also on Sunday, police in Baghdad said they had found at least 13 bodies in various districts of the city, some of which had been handcuffed and shot.

These latest developments come as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested that the US could pull significant numbers of troops out of Iraq this year, depending on the security situation.

There are currently about 133,000 US troops in Iraq. The Pentagon is reportedly aiming to cut that number to about 100,000 by the end of 2006.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 26 2006, 08:30 PM
"Iraqi Special Operations Forces conducted a twilight raid in the Aadhamiya neighbourhood in northeast Baghdad to disrupt a terrorist cell responsible for conducting attacks on Iraqi security and Coalition Forces and kidnapping Iraqi civilians in the local area," the statement said.
It's now clear this was in a mosque complex. Most of the dead were in a meeting of the Dawa party - not the Sadrists at all. And apparently it wasn't even in the Adhamiya neighborhood.

new York Times. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/international/middleeast/28iraq.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1)

The raid on Sunday happened at the Mustafa husayniyah, a small Shiite community center and mosque in Ur, a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.
The mosque, with a small minaret, is built around a central open-air courtyard and was frequented by followers of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.
....
Khudair al-Khuzaie, the spokesman for the Iraq Branch of the Islamic Dawa Party, said he knew of 16 victims, all of whom had been attending a meeting in the party's office at the time of the raid. The office is accessible through a doorway from the mosque's courtyard. Of the victims, he said, 13 were party members and 3 were civilians.

Jawad al-Maliki, a deputy to Prime Minister Jaafari's Dawa Party, accused the American command of committing "an ugly crime" that "has dangerous political and security dimensions intended to ignite the fire of civil war."

In the hours after the attack, an official in the office of Mr. Sadr claimed that members of his Mahdi Army were among the victims. But on Monday, another Sadr representative said no Mahdi Army fighters died in the raid.

Associated Press (http://www.tribstar.com/news/feeds/apcontent/apstories/apstorysection/D8GKABB01.xml.txt/resources_apstoryview)


In a conference call with reporters early Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, deputy commander in Iraq, and Maj. Gen. J.D. Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which is in control of Baghdad, said 25 U.S. forces were in a backup role to 50 Iraqi Special Operations troops.

The mission, the generals said, was developed by the Iraqis on their intelligence that an Iraqi dental technician, kidnapped 12 hours earlier because he could not come up with $20,000, was being held in what they called an office complex.

"It's important to remember we had an Iraqi unit with us, an Iraqi unit of 50 folks and they told us point blank that this was not a mosque," Chiarelli said. "It's not Mustafa mosque. Mustafa mosque is located six blocks north on our maps of this location."

Associated Press reporters who visited the scene of the raid identified it as a neighborhood Shiite mosque complex.

Now it may well be that people were kidnapped and held there; and that this Iraqi Special Operations unit told them these things.

Political context:
* the Shi'a theocratic militias - whether Badr Brigade, Sadrist, or Dawa - have been carrying out retaliation for Zarqawi's sectarian attacks on Shi'a neighborhoods and the mosque in Samarra. This includes a lot of abducting and killing.

*Some of the Iraqi special forces units are drawn from the old regime's special ops units; that's where the trained personnel were. They'd be predominantly Sunni Arab. Whether this was one of those units...would be interesting to know.

*The U.S. forces mostly don't speak the language and often have little clue what's going on - or, possibly, where they are.

*
The United States ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been pressing the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, to crack down on Shiite militias and rid the Interior Ministry of militia influence.

The militias, and their fighters working within the government's security forces, have been accused of conducting a dirty war against Sunni Arabs through kidnappings and executions, and thereby helping to push the country toward all-out civil war.

In addition, Mr. Khalilzad has been urging the Shiite leaders to be more politically accommodating to Sunni Arabs. In the aftermath of the bombing of a major Shiite shrine last month, Shiite leaders began to lash out at the ambassador for his insistence on working with the Sunnis and defended their use of militias for self-defense.

Some Shiite leaders warned that the raid had been widely interpreted among their constituents as a strong-arm tactic to cow them into making political concessions, including forcing the largest Shiite bloc to drop Mr. Jaafari as its nominee for prime minister in the new government.
....
Mr. Khalilzad has been pressuring Iraqi leaders to rein in the militias. On Saturday, he declared that more Iraqis were dying from militia violence than from the insurgency.


That's from the NYT again. The last refers to Shi'a militia and Shi'a theocratic leaders.

Also:

"The Shi'ites now believe the Americans, who brought them to power, are engaged in what they call the second betrayal. First the Americans abandoned them in the first Gulf War and now they believe the Americans are turning their backs on them," he said.

Hiltermann [of the International Crisis group] was referring to Shi'ite and Kurdish revolts in 1991 which Washington let Saddam Hussein crush, and to growing Shi'ite suspicion of recent U.S. attempts to calm a Sunni Arab insurgency by pushing for a Sunni role in a unity government.
The Age (http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/US-urged-to-hand-over-Iraqi-security/2006/03/28/1143441103872.html)

Conclusion: don't know what happened in this raid exactly - probably a damaging blunder by Washington, which has pissed off many of its clients.

But it's clearly part of the U.S. becoming the arbiter between the different sectarian and ethnic groups. Each group complains that the U.S. is unfairly favoring its rivals, which tends to imply a demand that the U.S. should act as a more impartial arbiter - and certainly cuts across any possiblity of united action against the occupation.

We've all seen this before in Yugoslavia, of course.

[Janus]

It's now clear this was in a mosque complex. Most of the dead were in a meeting of the Dawa party - not the Sadrists at all. And apparently it wasn't even in the Adhamiya neighborhood.
Well, news sources aren't infallible.

One thing that we do know for sure is that the sectarian violence is definitely rising.


Originally posted by BBC News
The bodies of 14 men, who had been blindfolded and shot in the head, have been found in Baghdad's western al-Adel district, Iraqi police say.

The identities of the men and the motive for their killing are not known.

The discovery of bodies has been an almost daily occurrence as sectarian violence has risen since the bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra last month.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, nine people working at a foreign exchange and an electronics shop were kidnapped.

Armed men wearing police uniforms kidnapped six people at the Moussa Bin Nasser Exchange Co in the south-western Harithiya district at 1300 (1000 GMT).

At the same time, the manager of the Daewoo Electric Appliances shop in Karrada and two engineers were seized.

On Monday, 16 employees of a trading company in Mansour were kidnapped.

Earlier this month, up to 50 people were seized from the offices of Iraqi security firm, al-Rawafed, in the Zayouna distract of Baghdad by people wearing police uniforms.

Journalist targeted

In other violence on Tuesday, three civilians were killed by an explosion outside the house of a correspondent for the US-funded Radio Sawa in the southern city of Nasiriya.

The correspondent, Mohammed Nur, escaped unhurt.

Iraqi police also thwarted a suicide bomb attack on a police station in Haswa, south of Baghdad.

Policemen opened fire on a mini-bus filled with explosives as it approached them at high speed.

The bus exploded, wounding 11 policemen and a female bystander. The blast also killed the two insurgents inside the bus.

[Janus]

Major reaction against the mosque massacre.


Originally posted by BBC News
Boycott calls, accusations of a massacre or of evidence being faked, and now a presidential inquiry.

A weekend raid by US-backed Iraqi special forces has sparked some unusually bitter exchanges between Iraq's politicians and the Americans.

In response, Baghdad's provincial council says it is suspending co-operation with both the US military and embassy.

Talks on forming a new government were briefly suspended and Iraq's president has ordered an investigation into the incident.

But many believe the key to the row is the increasing tension between the US and Iraq's dominant Shia political bloc - who have led the charges against the Americans

Graphic footage

Shia leaders have accused the Iraqi and US troops of massacring unarmed worshippers in a mosque - all of them believed to be Shia. One minister has said 37 unarmed men were killed.

The US military says no mosque was entered or damaged during the raid, which it says was carried out on a compound by 50 Iraqi special forces backed up by 25 American advisors.

In a statement, it said 16 people it describes as insurgents were killed and an Iraqi man held hostage there was freed.

US officials also say another 18 people were detained, and there are reports one of them is a senior figure in the Mehdi militia loyal to the radical anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr

Graphic footage shown on Iraqi TV channels of the bodies of men lying close together, apparently unarmed, have further fuelled concerns over the incident. But the Americans have suggested the scenes were faked.

"After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different than it was," said Lt General Peter Chiarelli, the number two US commander in Iraq, when asked about accusations unarmed people in a mosque had been killed.

Political pressure

There has been confusion too over who controls the shadowy Iraqi force involved.

The Iraqi defence ministry has denied knowledge about the operation. But the Americans insist the operation was co-ordinated with senior Iraqi military officials.
Many previous US operations have sparked controversy, but rarely have they generated this kind of political heat.

Some have also pointed out the contrast between the quick and vocal reaction to this incident and the lack of response from Iraqi politicians to the daily discovery of bodies around the capital, most of them believed to be victims of the continuing sectarian strife between Shias and Sunnis.

Many see this row as more about politics, at a time when months-old negotiations on forming a government between the Shias and other political groups are at a sensitive point - negotiations in which US diplomats are closely involved.

One Iraqi source with knowledge of the talks believes it is no coincidence that the first reaction of several Shia political figures to the disputed raid was to call for the Americans to hand over control of security matters to the Iraqi authorities.

"On that same day, the United Iraqi Alliance had been pushing for full control of security issues," the source said, referring to the main Shia political coalition. "That has been the key sticking point".

Amazement

But UIA figures insist their reaction is motivated by concern over what took place, not politics.

"Witnesses confirm to us that the people were praying in a mosque when they were attacked," said Dr Haider al-Abadi, an adviser to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari who is the UIA candidate to continue in the position.
"Why did the defence ministry deny any involvement?" he asked.

Another Shia figure, who asked not to be named, questioned American statements that an Iraqi dentist who had been taken hostage had been rescued.

"We are amazed by this," he said. "If someone had been kidnapped, why did the Iraqi police not know?"

But Dr Abadi admits the Shia alliance does feel under pressure from the Americans right now.

Shia leaders are not seeking confrontation, he said, but "politically, we cannot be seen to be complacent at the moment."

"If you look at the political and the security front, they [the Americans] are tightening the screw on just one side."

It is not clear how long this inquiry ordered by President Talabani to look into the raid will take.

But many see it as aimed more at reducing tensions over the incident, rather than being a comprehensive effort at finding out what happened.

[mo7amEd]

*Some of the Iraqi special forces units are drawn from the old regime's special ops units; that's where the trained personnel were. They'd be predominantly Sunni Arab. Whether this was one of those units...would be interesting to know.

I've heard EXACTLY the opposite, but do you have sources on that?

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 28 2006, 06:07 PM

*Some of the Iraqi special forces units are drawn from the old regime's special ops units; that's where the trained personnel were. They'd be predominantly Sunni Arab. Whether this was one of those units...would be interesting to know.

I've heard EXACTLY the opposite, but do you have sources on that?
Oh, the opposite is also true. If by that you mean that some units, like the "Wolf Brigade", are basically Shi'a militia operating under official cover. But those are mostly interior ministry, and this was an army unit. (The Interior Minister is from a Shi'a theocratic party.)

Other people have actually posted stuff about Ba'athist units in Washington's new army as supposedly an argument against me....I don't have that to hand right now.

[mo7amEd]

Originally posted by Severian+Mar 29 2006, 11:06 AM--> (Severian @ Mar 29 2006, 11:06 AM)
[email protected] 28 2006, 06:07 PM

*Some of the Iraqi special forces units are drawn from the old regime's special ops units; that's where the trained personnel were. They'd be predominantly Sunni Arab. Whether this was one of those units...would be interesting to know.

I've heard EXACTLY the opposite, but do you have sources on that?
Oh, the opposite is also true. If by that you mean that some units, like the "Wolf Brigade", are basically Shi'a militia operating under official cover. But those are mostly interior ministry, and this was an army unit. (The Interior Minister is from a Shi'a theocratic party.)

Other people have actually posted stuff about Ba'athist units in Washington's new army as supposedly an argument against me....I don't have that to hand right now. [/b]
Yeah I read it someplace about US getting help from ex-baathists to kill the insurgency.

But I also heard that everyone wh worked for the Republican Gard (the highest, most educated unit) was expelled from the new army.

[Severian]

Global Security says (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/nia.htm)

Excluded from New Iraqi Army include:

* Former persons from regime security organizations
* Intel organizations
* Special Republican Guards
* SSO
* Ba'ath Party security and militia organizations
* Top-level Ba'ath Party members

Former military officers of the rank of Lt Col and below were being accepted into the new organization with all other males between the age of 18-40 years and not listed on excluded list allowed to sign up at recruiting centers.

IIRC the Special Republican Guards were a smaller and more political force than the Republican Guards.

Also, that part of that page is from 2004; but I'd guess if the policy's changed it's more likely to have become looser than tighter.

[mo7amEd]

Maybe so...