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| Iraq |
| Iraqi PM says security forces control Kerbala |
| 2007-08-30 |
| Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki flew to the holy city of Kerbala on Wednesday and declared order had been restored after gunbattles among Shiite factions killed 52 people and forced thousands of pilgrims to flee. But the violence among Shiites spread overnight, with gunmen attacking the offices of a powerful Shiite party in at least five cities and setting many of them ablaze. The prime minister said his troops had restored calm to the city and blamed “outlawed armed criminal gangs from the remnants of the buried Saddam regime” for the violence. He ordered army Major-General Salih Al-Maliki, the head of the Kerbala command centre, to be sacked and investigated in the wake of the chaos, a defence ministry spokesman said. “The situation in Kerbala is under control after military reinforcements arrived and police and military Special Forces have spread throughout the city to purge those killers and criminals,” the prime minister said in a statement. Sporadic and occasionally sustained gunfire could still be heard after dawn in the city, coming from the area around the revered shrines of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas. Sirens of police cars and ambulances wailed and police loudspeakers ordered pilgrims out of the ancient centre of the city. The fighting on Tuesday killed 52 people and wounded 206, a senior security official in Baghdad said. The general director of Kerbala’s Al-Hussein hospital said its morgue had received 34 bodies and treated 239 wounded. An official at the shrines’ media office, Ali Kadhum, said the two shrines had been slightly damaged, with bullets hitting their domes and minarets and an electric power station ruined. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims had gathered to commemorate the 9th century birth of Imam Mohammad Al-Mahdi, the last of 12 imams that Shiites revere as saints. The battles appeared to pit the two biggest Shiite groups against each other — followers of cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia, and the rival Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), which controls police in much of the south. According to Reuters, police said gunmen torched SIIC buildings overnight in Baghdad’s Kadhimiya neighbourhood, in the city of Kufa, in Iskandariya and in the Al-Hamza district of Babil province. Police said five people were killed in clashes between the rival militias in Baghdad and six were killed in the attack on the SIIC building in Al-Hamza. Meanwhile, gunmen raided an Iraqi police checkpoint near the city of Mosul and killed six people, including five policemen, Brigadier General Saaed Ahmed Al-Juburi from Nineveh provincial police said. He said assailants armed with Kalashnikovs attacked the checkpoint in the town of Hamman Al-Alil, south of Mosul. “Five policeman and a bystander have been killed in the attack,” he said. |
| Posted by:Fred |