NASIRIYAH, Jan 19: Security forces on Saturday overran a mosque in southern Iraq where doomsday cultists were holed up, ending two days of clashes in two cities that killed 70 people.

The mosque was the last stronghold of the cultists.

Wearing yellow headbands and sporting the Star of David, they attacked police simultaneously early on Friday afternoon in the southern port city of Basra and in Nasiriyah, about 350 kilometres south of Baghdad.

Fighting raged in both cities through the afternoon, during which, according to officials, police posts and several processions marking Ashura were attacked with machine-guns and assault rifles.

The clashes died down in Basra during the night but continued sporadically in Nasiriyah.

A police official in Nasiriyah said Iraq’s security forces raided hideouts of the doomsday cultists at daybreak on Saturday, flushing them out of the mosque and houses they had occupied in Al-Salhiyah suburb.

“Some of the insurgents were killed and arrested while others fled during the raid,” the police official said.

The security forces had found the mosque to be booby-trapped and disposal experts later triggered a blast which destroyed the building, he said. Amid the rubble were found yellow headbands and anti-government literature.

Two policemen were killed by teenage snipers during Saturday’s clashes in Nasiriyah. The snipers, two 14-year-old boys, were quickly arrested.

Police officials said at least 35 cultists were killed in Basra and 18 in Nasiriyah. A total of 12 police, two Iraqi soldiers and three civilians were also killed, according to the latest police figures.

More than 120 cultists were arrested in Nasiriyah, Basra and in a raid in the town of Musayyib, 50 kilometres south of Baghdad.

Followers of the cult, led by Ahmed al-Hassani al-Yamani, seek to hasten the return of Imam Mahdi.

Yamani has his own website on which he claims to be an ambassador for Imam Mahdi, who he says is imminently to re-appear.

Aziz Alwan, governor of southeastern Dhi Qar province of which Nasiriyah is the capital, told a news conference that modern weaponry had been seized from members of the messianic cult.

“They believed the Mahdi would appear on the evening of Ashura and that their leader (Yamani) would be his ambassador,” Alwan said.

During Ashura last January, another militant sect dubbing itself the Jund al-Samaa, or “Soldiers of Heaven”, clashed with US and Iraqi forces outside Karbala and Najaf.

Last year’s fighting left 263 sect followers dead, including their leader Dhia Abdul Zahra Kadhim al-Krimawi, also known as Abu Kamar, who believed he was descended from the Holy Prophet (pbuh).—AFP