Baghdad under curfew amid fears of new violence
The streets of the city fell silent, apart from the rumble of US
armoured cars and helicopter gunships and the occasional dull thud of an
explosion.
"The curfew was implemented on the advice of multinational forces to
the prime minister because they felt violence would increase today,"
interior ministry spokesman Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf told
AFP.
A US military spokesman would not say why it had recommended a curfew
but only that "intermittent curfews have been an effective means of
reducing violence in the past".
On Friday, US forces arrested a security guard of Adnan Dulaimi, a
leading lawmaker and head of the main Sunni bloc in Iraq's parliament
and fragile coalition government, the National Concord Front.
"The detained individual is suspected of involvement in the planning
of a multi-vehicle suicide operation inside Baghdad's International
Zone," a US military statement said, alleging the suspect was a member
of al-Qaeda.
Dulaimi demanded the release of his guard, but told AFP that US
forces had been polite and had not entered his home itself, but had
searched the nearby guards' quarters with sniffer dogs before making the
arrest.
One week into the annual Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Baghdad is in
the grip of an intense wave of sectarian and insurgent violence, which
Iraqi and United Nations officials report is now killing more than 100
people per day.
Police said Saturday that over the previous 24 hours they had found
the corpses of 23 unidentified murder victims in Baghdad, 13 of them in
largely Sunni west Baghdad and 10 in the Shiite-dominated east.
On Wednesday, a US military spokesman said suicide attacks in the
capital had reached their highest level since the US-lead invasion of
2003.
Civilian flights into Baghdad International Airport were cancelled
Saturday, according to airport officials, while all pedestrian and road
traffic was banned from the streets until at least 6:00 a.m. on Sunday
(0200 GMT).
Occasional cars with security clearance could be seen moving
cautiously through deserted streets, while a column of US army Stryker
armoured vehicles rolled over a bridge across the Tigris into the
downtown Risafa district.
Police reported heavy fighting through the night in the southern
flashpoint neighbourhood of Dura where Turki Abdel Jabbar al-Taif, one
of the leaders of the powerful Sunni Marsumi tribe, was shot dead on
Saturday.
In another high-profile assassination, the brother-in-law of the
chief judge in the ongoing trial of Saddam Hussein was shot dead on
Thursday night.
It was not immediately clear whether the judge's family had been shot
by the ousted dictator's supporters in order to intimidate him, or
simply because they were Shiites living in a Sunni district in the grip
of sectarian fighting.
The killings came after the supposed leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq
released a recorded message on the Internet in which he threatened a new
"all-out offensive" against Iraq's US-backed government.
Meanwhile, in the town of Tall Afar, in the far northwest of the
country, policemen opened fire on a suspicious vehicle heading towards
them which then exploded, an apparent suicide car bomb, killing two
people and wounding 30.
And in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, a major Iraqi security
operation was under way to root out insurgent gangs that have been
pursuing a sectarian dirty war in the mixed Sunni and Shiite region
around Baquba.
"For the second day running our forces have launched raids and made
detentions in western neighbourhoods of Baquba," said Brigadier General
Shakr al-Kaabi of the 5th Iraqi Army Division.
"We have arrested 130 people, of whom 85 were wanted," he added.
"Weapons and ammunition were seized in these neighbourhoods, including
sticks of dynamite and artillery shells."
Western Baquba's neighbourhoods have seen some of the worst sectarian
cleansing of the city, with hundreds of Shiite families forced to flee
under threat of Sunni death squads. |