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Street Battles in Iraqi Cities Point to Dire Security Status
By KIRK SEMPLE
BAGHDAD, May 16 — Sprawling street battles between militia gunmen and Iraqi security forces erupted in three cities on Wednesday on a day of wide-ranging violence that underscored the grave security situation across much of Iraq.
In the northern city of Mosul, more than 200 Sunni Arab insurgents carried out a sophisticated attack on several targets using suicide car bombers, rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles and improvised bombs, said Maj. Gen. Watheq al-Hamdani, the top police commander in Mosul.
Four police officers died in the fighting, while 14 others were wounded along with 16 civilians, General Hamdani said.
The attack began at dusk when gunmen tried to storm the main provincial jail, the commander said. When police forces responded, the insurgents attacked them with six suicide car bombs, and 14 bombs planted on surrounding roads exploded.
As the police and insurgents fought near the prison, gunmen also attacked the houses of General Hamdani and Khasro Goran, deputy governor of Mosul Province and one of the senior members of a leading Kurdish political party, the police commander said. Neither man was wounded.
Gunmen also fired on a woman and her child in an eastern neighborhood, killing the woman and severely wounding the child, though it is unclear whether the shooting was related to the siege, said Gen. Said Ahmad al-Jibouri, a spokesman for the Mosul police.
Insurgents used two car bombs to destroy a bridge in Badush, about 15 miles west of the city, and five prisoners facing terrorism charges escaped from the jail there, killing two prison guards in the process, according to Brig. Gen. Mohammad al-Waga.
The authorities in Mosul imposed a round-the-clock curfew and blockaded five bridges that span the Tigris, which bisects the city, the general said.
Earlier in the day, in the southern city of Diwaniya, scores of militiamen loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr fought street battles against Iraqi soldiers as government security forces swept into militia strongholds as part of a government crackdown, local officials said.
At least 11 people — eight civilians, two police officers and one solider — were wounded in the fighting, which raged for seven hours and by some official estimates involved as many as 200 militia members, police and army commanders said. As the clashes worsened, the provincial governor moved his family to safety in Iran, a police commander said.
According to local government officials, the fighting was triggered by the recent arrests of several members of Mr. Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, in Diwaniya, which is about 110 miles south of the capital.
But the fighting tapped into a longtime power struggle between Mr. Sadr’s loyalists and supporters of a rival Shiite party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which controls the government of Diwaniya Province and its police force. That party, formerly called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, changed its name last week.
Mahdi Army fighters have occasionally battled members of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council’s armed wing, the Badr Organization. But provincial and tribal officials said the fighting on Wednesday was mostly between Mahdi gunmen and members of the Iraqi Army’s Eighth Division, which is not considered to be a pawn of the provincial leadership or the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council.
“The market is closed and people are afraid that things might escalate,” Sheik Hussein al-Shaalan, the head of a tribe in Diwaniya and a secular member of Parliament, said in an interview late Wednesday.
News agencies reported that similar clashes, pitting the Iraqi police against Mahdi militiamen angry about the arrest of two of their members, broke out late Tuesday in Nasiriya, about 120 miles southeast of Diwaniya, and continued into the early morning hours on Wednesday. At least nine Iraqis were killed and 75 wounded in the fighting, The Associated Press reported.
Few other regions across Iraq were untouched by violence on Wednesday.[/q]
but not to worry folks! the violence that's engulfing the nation is all within 90 miles of Baghdad! or at least it used to be! so let's continue to say it is! pay NO attention to the speed at which the society is plunging into total chaos and the utter inability of a totally inept, illegitimate government to stop the fall! we've got not one but TWO governments who are thoroughly incompetent at governance!