Violent clashes erupt in Diwaniya
NAJAF: The US-led coalition and militiamen of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr clashed in the southern Iraqi city of Diwaniya on Tuesday, the cleric’s spokesman said.
“Violent clashes are currently taking place in the middle of the city,” Ali Kharsane said, without specifying if there were casualties.
Meanwhile, a clash on Monday in neighbouring Najaf, south of Baghdad, between US forces and members of Sadr’s Mehdi Army killed five Iraqis and wounded 15, a hospital director said.
Sadr militiamen also spread out into Amarah, in the British zone of control, witnesses said. There was no immediate comment from the British military.
A spokesman for Moqtada Sadr warned on Tuesday that his militia would attack any US military checkpoint between Najaf and Kufa further north, saying the Americans provoked clashes on Monday that killed five Iraqis and wounded 20.
The US army killed four attackers with artillery fire after they shot at US aircraft flying in support of a ground patrol late on Monday in northwestern Baghdad, while two US soldiers, a soldier and a Marine, were also killed in separate attacks on Monday, the US military said on Tuesday. The Marine from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died after action in al-Anbar province, west of Baghdad, an area that includes Fallujah. The soldier from the 1st Armoured Division was killed and two others wounded when they came under small arms fire south of Baghdad.
An interpreter with the US Army was shot dead in traffic Tuesday in the northern city of Mosul by unknown assailants in another car, Iraqi police said
Two Iraqi students were killed when police and coalition forces opened fire as they arrested a senior associate of radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr, a professor at their university in Hilla (100 kilometres south of Baghdad) said on Monday. Militants loyal to Sadr clashed with US troops overnight near Kufa, witnesses said on Tuesday. They had no immediate information on casualties.
He said US soldiers at a coalition base in Najaf previously occupied by Spanish and Latin American troops provoked Monday’s clashes by firing at a pickup truck transporting fighters from Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia from Najaf to Kufa on a back street in the city’s industrial neighbourhood.
The US is going to keep beefed-up levels of about 135,000 troops in Iraq for the future, senior defence officials said on Monday.
The Pentagon moved last month to build up the force to deal with uprisings in the south and in Fallujah by extending the tours of 20,000 troops from the 1st Armoured Division and the 2nd Armoured Cavalry Regiment for at least three months. Criminal investigations had been launched in December 2002 into 35 cases of alleged detainee abuse in military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 25 deaths in custody, a senior army official said Tuesday
Major General Donald Ryder, the army’s chief law enforcement officer, said the deaths included two alleged homicides of inmates by soldiers, the killing of an inmate attempting to escape, and 10 other deaths that were still under investigation. —Agencies
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