Authorities put the Iraqi city of Diwaniya under curfew yesterday after a man was killed and several wounded in clashes that followed a US army raid on an office of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Car bombs and drive-by shootings yesterday killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens of others in a series of attacks around central Iraq, officials said.
In the first attack, a car bomb targeting a police patrol in a Shiite neighborhood of northern Baghdad missed, instead killing a civilian and wounding 13 others, police said.
PHOTO: AFP
Another car bomb then blew up bear the government's passport office in central Baghdad, killing nine people and wounding 17. The injured included four police officers,said police Lieutenant Bilal Ali.
The blast created a large crater in the street in front of the office, destroyed at least three cars, scattered debris and knocked down the walls of a neighboring house, TV news footage showed.
Gunmen in Baqubah, 60km northeast of Baghdad, killed two police officers in a drive-by shooting. Another group of gunmen shot and killed three people in Ghazaniya, just north of Baqubah.
Police also found the body of a brigadier in the former Iraqi army two days after he was kidnapped Mahmoudiya, 30km south of Baghdad, Captain Udai Abdel-Rihda said.
Ten people were wounded in Diwaniya, 180km south of Baghdad, yesterday, doctors said, after guards at the provincial governor's office fired on dozens of Sadr followers protesting about the overnight raid.
A woman and child were hurt when US troops clashed with stone-throwing Sadr supporters outside their group's local headquarters.
Officials in Sadr's movement said US troops raided their headquarters in Diwaniya around 4am, removing computers and papers.
A local journalist saw soldiers return to the area of the Sadr office, on a crowded, narrow commercial street, later in the morning.
People near the office threw rocks at the Americans, and there was some shooting and explosions, he said.
He saw an object thrown from a US patrol vehicle, then heard a blast. A woman and her daughter, aged about eight, were hurt, in the explosion, he said.
After the US force withdrew, several dozen Sadr supporters marched to the office of the governor, where guards there opened fire on them. Gunmen then also appeared among the demonstrators.
An influential Sunni Arab political party said that US forces raided its Baghdad headquarters early yesterday and briefly detained one of its legislators.
Ahmed al-Janabi a spokesman for the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni party that is part the Iraqi Accordance Front -- a Sunni Arab coalition -- said that US forces broke into the group's offices in western Baghdad and detained and interrogated deputy Abdel-Nasir al-Janabi for two hours.
The party has 12 deputies in the 275-seat parliament.
Meanwhile, a Sunni political leader warned yesterday that Iraq's political process could collapse if sectarian death squads are not reined in.
"If these barbarian acts do not stop, certainly it will effect the reconciliation plan," Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the Iraqi Accordance Front, the biggest Sunni Arab group in parliament, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
His call came after after day that was bloody even by Baghdad's standards, when car bombs, mortars and other attacks killed at least 39 people and wounded dozens on Wednesday.
Police also uncovered the tortured bodies of 65 men dumped in and around the city.
Sunni leaders say the Shiite-led government has turned a blind eye to Shiite death squads and corrupt militia that control the police.
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