The Iraqi government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew yesterday after insurgent gunmen set up roadblocks in central Baghdad and opened fire on US and Iraqi troops just north of the heavily fortified Green Zone.
With just two hours notice, the prime minister ordered everyone off the streets of the capital from 2pm yesterday until 6am today. US and Iraqi forces also were engaged in firefights with insurgents in the dangerous Dora neighborhood in south Baghdad.
As the state of emergency was announced in the capital, a car bomb ripped through a market and nearby gas station in the increasingly volatile southern city of Basra yesterday, killing at least five people and wounding 18, including two policemen, police said.
At least 19 other deaths were reported in Baghdad.
Throughout the morning Friday, Iraqi and US military forces clashed with attackers who were armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles in busy Haifa Street that runs into the Green Zone, site of the US and British embassies and the Iraqi government.
Two Iraqi soldiers and a policeman were wounded in the fighting, said police Lieutenant Maitham Abdul Razzaq said.
The region was sealed and Iraqi and US forces conducted house-to-house searches.
Gunmen also attacked a group of worshippers marching from Sadr City, the Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad, to the Buratha mosque on the other side of the city to protest a suicide attack a week ago on the revered Shiite shrine. At least one marcher was killed and four were wounded, Lieutenant Ahmed Mohammed Ali said.
The US military yesterday said a Marine had died in combat and a soldier was killed in an unspecified non-hostile incident three days earlier. Their deaths raise to at least 2,514 members of the US military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The new security measures came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sought to rein in unrelenting insurgent and sectarian violence. He launched a massive security operation in Baghdad 10 days ago, deploying tens of thousands of troops who flooded the city, snarling traffic with hundreds of checkpoints.
While violence had diminished somewhat, the outbreak of fighting on Haifa Street and in the Dora neighborhood apparently prompted al-Malaki to declare the state of emergency even as Friday prayer services were in progress, sending many residents scrambling homeward to beat the curfew.
Also yesterday, police said they found the bodies of five men who apparently were victims of a mass kidnapping from a factory on Wednesday. The bodies, which showed signs of torture and had their hands and legs bound, were floating in a canal in northern Baghdad, Razzaq said.
A police raid on a farm on Thursday freed 17 of the captives, who were believed to have been taken by Sunni extremists as they boarded company buses for the trip home after work at the al-Nasr General Complex, a former military plant about 30km north of Baghdad that now makes metal doors, windows and pipes.
There has been rampant sectarian violence in the region, where tit-for-tat kidnappings and revenge killings are frequent, but nothing on the scale of the abduction on Wednesday. The al-Nasr plant is between Baghdad and Taji, a predominantly Sunni Arab area.
Initial reports said as many as 85 people were taken. But Industry Minister Fowzi Hariri told state-run Iraqiya TV on Thursday that 64 people were abducted and two of those were killed trying to escape.
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