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Twelve killed in Mehdi clashes

Twelve people died in overnight clashes in Baghdad’s Sadr City district, which has become a chief battleground between US and Iraqi forces and the Mehdi Army of anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, police and hospital officials said yesterday.

Iraqi troops also kept up the pressure on Shiite militants in the southern city of Basra, where they fanned out through a Mehdi Army stronghold.

In Sadr City’s general hospital, officials said 71 people were admitted for treatment of injuries received in the fighting. The hospital also received 12 bodies, said an official who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to release the information.

The fighting came amid reports that Iraqi troops backed up by US forces were trying to recapture a position in the district abandoned a day ago by a company of government soldiers.

Security forces in the area also have come under repeated attack by militants trying to prevent the construction of a concrete wall through the district.

The wall — a concrete barrier of varying height up to about 3.6m — is being built along a main street dividing the southern portion of Sadr City from the northern, where al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army fighters are concentrated.

US commanders hope that construction of the Sadr City wall, which began on Tuesday, will effectively cut off insurgents’ ability to move freely into the rest of Baghdad and hamper their ability to fire rockets and mortars at the Green Zone, the central Baghdad district where government offices and the US embassy are located. The zone has been regularly shelled since the Iraqi military launched an operation against Shiite militias in Basra on March 25.

Such walls have gone up in many other Baghdad neighborhoods and have been effective in cutting violence as the movement of insurgents was curtailed. But they have also raised some complaints from residents over difficulties in moving in and out through checkpoints.

The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also kept up the pressure on al-Sadr’s followers in Basra, launching an operation early yesterday aimed at clearing militants from the Hayaniyah district, a Mehdi Army stronghold in Iraq’s oil capital.

British artillery and US warplanes were supporting the Iraqi army operation, which met minimal resistance, military spokesman Major Tom Holloway said.

He said that as a show of force British gunners fired a barrage of shells into an empty area near Hayanihah and US warplanes bombed it.

“This was intended to demonstrate the firepower available to the Iraqi forces,” Holloway said.

Meanwhile, the US military said a US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in Salahuddin Province.

At least 4,038 members of the US military have died since the war started in March 2003, an Associated Press tally showed.
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