In Air Attack, U.S. Soldiers Kill 18 Gunmen
08/26/2007
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
NY Times
Published: August 25, 2007
BAGHDAD, Aug. 24 — American soldiers battled Shiite militiamen in a poor neighborhood in northern Baghdad early on Friday, firing from helicopters and killing 18 gunmen, the American military said.
The fight began shortly after midnight, residents said, when an American patrol in Shuala, an impoverished expanse of concrete houses heavily controlled by Shiite militias, came under fire. Soldiers fired back and a gunfight began.
Some time later, attack helicopters circling above spotted 8 to 12 men carrying machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, moving toward American soldiers on the ground, and fired down into the men, the military said in a statement.
The pilots later observed “several other Iraqi citizens,” protecting the site of the attack. They did not say whether they had shot at the Americans. The Americans then searched the area, and found weapons, including two advanced roadside bombs, in an abandoned house.
According to an Al Hakim Hospital official, there were 13 dead, including 2 women, and another 15 wounded. The military said all of the victims were armed fighters.
The American military has been arresting dozens of senior Shiite militia leaders, particularly at night, and they occasionally have fought back in sudden, short, firefights like the one on Friday morning. The military has said it has damaged Shiite militant networks, but as criminal motives begin to replace sectarian ones, the fight has proved difficult.
The fight was evidence of the changing nature of the war. The military says that 78 percent of attacks against the United States are now carried out by Shiites, not Sunni militants, who had caused the vast majority of the violence in the early years of the war.
Also on Friday, Iraqi Army soldiers wounded four Shiite militia members in the southeastern neighborhood of Zafraniya. The clash was unusual, as the Iraqi Army is overwhelmingly Shiite, and tends to avoid clashes with Shiite militias.
A bomb exploded on Friday morning near an oil pipeline in Al Muinat, a village south of Baghdad, setting it on fire and sending smoke and flame shooting into the sky for hours.
New details emerged of a direct assault by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia on two small villages near the central Iraqi city of Baquba, where the local sheiks had openly opposed the militant organization. Six tribe members were killed, including Sheik Younis Hamid Abid, who had told villagers that Al Qaeda “represents Satan, and God orders us to kill them because they killed our sons, burned our houses and destroyed our orchards and fields,” according to a relative, Jalal Ahmed al-Kharki.
Another 14 — 9 women and 5 children — were taken hostage, according to the American military, which said it had been monitoring the fight. Sunnis from the 20th Revolutionary Brigade, a militant Iraqi group, helped security forces drive Al Qaeda out.
Al Qaeda mounted another assault in central Iraq on Thursday, attacking the police around a shrine, and killing a woman, a child, and two policemen, a police official said.
Iraq’s government continued talks with Turkey over Kurdish militants that Turkey says were hiding in Iraqi mountains just across its border. In the second high-level visit in a month, Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq’s Sunni vice president, visited Ankara on Friday, and told Turkish officials that his country was taking care not to allow militants to operate from Iraq.
Turkey’s military has threatened to launch an operation into northern Iraq to kill Kurdish militants it says are hiding there and attacking Turkish security forces.
Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq accused Iran of shelling its eastern border region near the village of Penjwin. Shelling began on Aug. 16, according to a Reuters report, and has caused some villagers to flee their houses.
Iraqi authorities announced the death of Abdel-Rahman Aref, a former Iraqi president, who took part in the 1958 coup that overthrew the Iraqi monarchy. He ruled from 1966 to 1968, until the Baath Party ousted him. He died in Amman, Jordan. He was 91.