Iraqi troops, backed by US soldiers, battled their way yesterday amid fierce resistance into a town where Sunni extremists abducted dozens of people and threatened to kill them unless all Shiites left town.
Conflicting accounts existed among government officials over whether hostages had been freed from Al-Madain, where the crisis had sparked fears of wider sectarian strife between Iraq's Shiite majority and embittered Sunnis.
Meanwhile, 19 corpses were also found south of Baghdad in the latest discovery of executed bodies in the region around Madain populated by a mixture of Shiites, Saddam Hussein loyalists and hardcore Islamists.
Members of parliament meeting yesterday expressed outrage over the Madain hostage drama and called for a military strike against the belt of towns south of the capital.
"By the end of this week, we will be conducting a military offensive starting from Jurf Al-Nadaf through al-Wida and al-Madain," National Security Advisor Qassem al-Daoud told parliament, naming a string of towns on the capital's outskirts.
After a day of tense standoff, Iraqi forces, backed by US troops, went into battle yesterday morning.
"Police forces, backed by coalition forces, entered the town at 9am and encountered severe resistance from the terrorists," a defense ministry official said.
Government forces recaptured half of the town and freed 10 to 15 families held hostage by the gunmen, he said yesterday morning, adding that the clashes were continuing.
However this was contradicted by Daoud, who denied in parliament that the ongoing rescue operation, involving one US and four Iraqi battalions, had found any hostages.
Officials have suggested the number of hostages in town could be as high as 80.
The take-over by gunmen on Saturday of Madain, a town built on the ruins of the ancient city of Ctesiphonon, was the most blatant attempt to date to purge a community of a rival ethnic or religious faction in the two years since Saddam's regime fell.
Raising tensions further, the gunmen blew up an empty Shiite mosque in the town on Saturday.
"These are terrorist activities aiming at stirring civil war," Daoud told parliament.
Shiite MP Jalaluddin al-Saghir, a hardline cleric who preaches weekly to thousands of faithful at Baghdad's Baratha mosque, hinted the country was teetering on the edge of chaos.
Jumping into the fray, the al-Qaeda chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, accused the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government of fabricating the whole crisis so they could attack Sunnis.
"The Iraqi army and police, helped by the crusaders and the Jews, raided Sunnis' houses and attacked them. They then arrested them and took them to Kut, without ... reason," the group said in an Internet statement, whose authenticity could not be verified.
In ongoing violence, three US soldiers were killed and seven wounded in a mortar attack on a US military base near Ramadi, west of Baghdad on Saturday evening, a statement from the US military said yesterday.
Two senior Iraqi police officers and a municipal councillor were also gunned down by suspected insurgents.
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