Suspected insurgents stormed a police station south of Baghdad early yesterday, killing four policemen and wounding at least five, authorities said.
The attack came a day after 100 masked gunmen stormed a jail near the Iranian border to free fellow insurgents being held near a police station. At least 20 security men were killed in that attack.
The gunmen in yesterday's pre-dawn assault used automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades to enter the station in Madain, which is about 20km southeast of Baghdad, 1st Lieutenant Mohammed Khyoun of the Baghdad police said.
On Tuesday morning, the 100 gunmen cut phone wires and also fired rocket-propelled grenades in a daring operation that freed 18 fellow insurgents who had been captured in police raids just two days earlier.
Police said 15 other captives were sprung in the assault on the Muqdadiyah lockup and at least 10 insurgents were killed.
In an Internet posting on Tuesday night the military wing of the Mujaheddin Shura Council, a militant Sunni Muslim insurgent group, purportedly claimed it carried out the operation. The Web posting said the group killed "40 policemen, liberated 33 prisoners and captured weapons." The claim was posted on the Iraqi News Web site and could not be independently verified.
With the telephone lines cut, the insurgents had 90 minutes to battle their way into the law enforcement compound before police reinforcements showed up from the nearby villages of Wajihiyah and Abu Saida, police said.
Muqdadiyah, on the eastern fringe of the Sunni Triangle, is about 40km from the Iranian frontier.
By the time the insurgents fled, taking away the bodies of many of their dead compatriots, nearly two dozen cars were shot up and set on fire and the jail was a charred mass of twisted bunk bed frames and smoldering mattresses.
US helicopters were in the air above the jail after the insurgents had fled. Police said there was firing into the air by residents, but it was not clear if the US aircraft were the target. None was hit.
The insurgency's strength, spiraling sectarian violence and the continuing stalemate over forming a government in Iraq have led politicians and foreign policy experts to say Iraq was on the brink or perhaps in the midst of civil war.
The administration of US President George W. Bush has rejected that gloomy assessment, and the president spoke to the issue again on Tuesday.
"We all recognized that there is violence, that there is sectarian violence. But the way I look at the situation is, the Iraqis looked and decided not to go into civil war," Bush said.
With an increasing number of Americans calling for a pullout of US forces regardless of the consequences for Iraq, a powerful group of US senators met with interim Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari on Tuesday to discuss prospects for formation of a national unity government. The Bush administration views that step as important in opening the way for the start of a US troop withdrawal.
Al-Jaafari said he believed Iraq's most difficult political hurdles had been crossed and predicted a new government would be ready in the coming weeks.
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