Iraqi PM takes exception to US-led raid in Sadr City
BAGHDAD, Aug 8: Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Tuesday said he had not authorised Sunday’s ‘unjustified’ nighttime assault by Iraqi troops and US advisers on a target in the impoverished east Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.
The raid, which the defence ministry and US-led forces said had targeted a death squad, triggered a clash with men loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose movement is part of Mr Maliki’s coalition.
Western aircraft were called into action after the Iraqi army snatch squad came under fire, and at least three civilians were killed.
Speaking on state television, Mr Maliki said such raids “should not happen again in order to protect the reconciliation process.
“I reiterate my rejection to such an operation and it should not be executed without my consent. This particular operation did not have my approval.”
Mr Maliki’s anger underlined the delicate political situation in Baghdad, where the army is trying to combat sectarian death squads without being drawn into war with the militias, some of which are linked to parties in government.
Any sign of a rift between US forces and the prime minister will raise concerns as the allies relauch a joint operation to pacify the capital.
24 KILLED: Bombings and shooting killed at least 24 people and wounded 80 in Baghdad on Tuesday, as a previous raid by US and Iraqi troops into a Shia militia stronghold stirred political controversy.
At least five bomb blasts killed a total of 19 people, two rockets fell inside the highly fortified Green Zone and five Iraqis were killed in a bank robbery, security officials said.
The first bomb hit at dawn, when a roadside booby-trap ripped open a minibus and a taxi in the downtown Nahda area. Nine commuters were killed and eight wounded, an interior ministry official said.
Almost immediately afterwards, two more blasts targeted a police patrol nearby, wounding three officers, he added.
Four hours later, two bombs detonated in rapid succession in the crowded Shorjah market in the commercial heart of the city.
Ten people were killed and 69 wounded in the blasts, which set fire to several shops. Five days ago 10 people were killed in Shorjah when an explosives-laden moped detonated.
The bombings are a challenge to Mr Maliki’s efforts to regain control of Baghdad and halt what many see as Iraq’s slide towards civil war.
His two-month-old Operation Forward Together has so far made little impact on the daily toll of bombings and death squad killings, and more military reinforcements are being sent to the city.
Mr Maliki’s US allies have also responded to the threat. More than 10,000 coalition troops are now supporting the operation, following the arrival at the weekend of the 3,700-strong 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
“The situation in Baghdad is very difficult right now,” the US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said Tuesday in an interview with ABC television.
“And we are working very closely with the new Iraqi government to improve the plan we had in place, to bring security in Baghdad,” he said.
Casey said Iraq was still a long way from all-out civil war but “the levels of sectarian violence in Baghdad in the last probably six weeks are higher than they’ve ever been.”
He said additional US and Iraqi troops are to be deployed to flashpoint mixed districts of the city, where violence between Sunnis and Shiites is at its worst.
Tuesday’s bombings, which are likely to be blamed on Sunni extremists attacking Baghdad’s Shiite majority, can be expected to feed the cycle of revenge attacks by Shiite death squads.
Such killings leave around a dozen tortured corpses in the streets and waterways of Baghdad every day. According to the United Nations, nearly 6,000 Iraqis were killed in May and June alone, mostly in Baghdad.
Five more Baghdadis were killed in a robbery, when gunmen stormed the Al-Rasheed Bank in north central Baghdad, the official said.
The gang killed three guards and two bank employees, then escaped with seven million dinars (less than 5,000 dollars).
Elsewhere, a doctor at a hospital morgue in Kut, 175 kilometres (110 miles) southeast of Baghdad, said he had received the bullet-riddled corpses of seven Iraqi border guards found in Kharqush, a village on the Iranian border.
In Tikrit, one policeman was killed and three others wounded when their patrol struck a bomb, police said.
And gunmen ambushed a group of Iraqi mine disposal experts in the northern town of Kolajo, triggering a firefight with their armed escorts that left one of the attackers dead, a local official said.—AFP
