US and Iraqi military forces clashed with armed gangs during a search operation yesterday in the southern Iraqi town of Diwaniyah, leaving 20 dead and a US main battle tank destroyed.
Clashes raged on overnight and sporadic gunfire continued into yesterday morning, when a curfew was imposed throughout the city.
"There was an attack last night in Diwaniyah in which three rocket propelled grenade teams attacked ... soldiers who were conducting combat operations," US-led coalition headquarters said in a statement.
PHOTO: AFP
Seven civilians were wounded in the clashes, one of them critically, local medics said. The US military reported no coalition casualties.
An Iraqi defense department official said the clashes erupted after a joint US-Iraqi force raided the home of Kifah al-Greiti, a local commander for the Mahdi Army of firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
But military sources in Diwaniyah denied they had attempted to arrest the militia chief, insisting that a routine Iraqi army patrol had been ambushed, provoking a fierce gun and rocket-propelled grenade duel.
In August, Diwaniyah was the scene of fierce clashes between the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi army that resulted in at least 60 dead.
There were occasional flare ups last month.
"Our reports currently indicate that a CF [coalition forces] tank was destroyed during clashes last night with insurgents," said a coalition spokesperson. "The tank destroyed was a M1A2 second generation Abrams."
US armored vehicles such as the Abrams are almost immune to the typical roadside booby-traps employed by Iraq's militias and insurgent groups.
But commanders have warned that more sophisticated devices are being smuggled from Iran.
According to US officials, within the region this technology is exclusively Iranian and only found in the possession of Shiite militias.
Coalition forces in Baghdad have recently been conducting exploratory forays into district near the Shiite militia bastion of Sadr City in Baghdad but have yet to receive Iraqi government approval for a full-scale entry.
In other Baghdad violence, a senior officer in the Iraqi police internal affairs department was shot dead in Baghdad yesterday, just five days after an entire police brigade was accused of colluding with sectarian death squads.
Security officials identified the victim as Colonel Tamer Salman, assistant to the director of police internal affairs, an increasingly important unit at a time when the government is under pressure to purge disloyal officers.
Iraq's fledgling police force has been accused of taking sides in the country's increasingly brutal sectarian war, with Shiite-dominated units said to allow militia fighters to attack Baghdad's Sunni minority.
Other attacks around Baghdad yesterday included a mortar attack in Waziriyah in central Baghdad on a police patrol which killed one policeman and wounded another, as well as a bystander.
South of the capital, in the restive Babil province, police discovered a corpse lying by the side of the road but when they attempted to move it, gunmen opened fire on them, wounding a policeman.
The central Iraqi province of Salaheddin witnessed the death of four civilians near former leader Saddam Hussein's home village when their car struck roadside bomb.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS