Up to nine coalition soldiers and 24 Iraqis were killed and more than 200 people wounded, after a radical Shiite leader urged his supporters to "terrorize" the enemy, while top US lawmakers called for more US troops in Iraq.
It was the worst fighting between US forces and the country's Shiite majority since the US-led invasion of Iraq one year ago when US troops were welcomed as liberators by the community.
PHOTO: AFP
Late Sunday, a pitched battle with the militia of young Shiite firebrand Moqtada Sadr claimed the lives of seven US soldiers in the poverty-stricken Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.
Top US lawmakers, questioning whether the June 30 deadline for handover to Iraqi sovereignty was realistic in light of the upsurge in violence, called for more US troops in Iraq.
"I think it's probably time to have that debate," Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told ABC. He called the employment of 3,000 people in a future US embassy there, amid no current nomination for an ambassador "a huge new exposure of Americans."
The US-led coalition occupying Iraq, under pressure from its allies and factions inside Iraq, agreed last year to hand over sovereignty to an interim government by July 1.
Lugar and the committee's leading Democrat, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, said the latest violence showed Iraqi security forces unprepared for the handover date.
They said more US troops would be needed to disarm militias threatening stability of a new Iraqi government.
In an ominous development that threatens to widen the rift between Iraq's Shiite majority and the occupation forces, Sadr told supporters to "terrorize" the enemy, saying demonstrations were now pointless.
"Terrorise your enemy, as we cannot remain silent over its violations," Sadr said in a statement distributed Sunday by his office in Kufa, south of Baghdad. It was not clear if Sadr was literally calling on his followers to resort to violence.
In the fighting in Baghdad, the US soldiers died trying to prevent members of Sadr's several thousand-strong Mehdi Army, militias made up of mainly unemployed, young Shiites, taking control of police and public buildings.
Ten Iraqis were wounded and a US military humvee vehicle was set ablaze.
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