Iraqi Gov't Declares State Of Emergency

Iraqi Govt Declares State of Emergency

http://apnews.myway.com/article/2006...8IDS8UO0.htmly

By SINAN SALAHEDDIN
Jun 23, 6:36 AM (ET)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The Iraqi government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew Friday after insurgent gunmen set up roadblocks in central Baghdad and opened fire on U.S. 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 2 p.m. Friday until 6 a.m. Saturday. U.S. 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 Friday, 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 U.S. 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 U.S. and British embassies and the Iraqi government.

Two Iraqi soldiers and a policeman were wounded in the fighting, said police Lt. Maitham Abdul Razzaq said.

The region was sealed and Iraqi and U.S. 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, Lt. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said.

The U.S. military on Friday 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 U.S. 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 Friday, 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, police Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.

A police raid on a farm 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 20 miles 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 common, but nothing on the scale of Wednesday's abduction. The al-Nasr plant is between Baghdad and Taji, a predominantly Sunni Arab area.

Initial reports said as many as 85 people, including women who had taken their children to work, 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.

Thirty people, mainly women and children, were freed shortly after the kidnapping, leaving 15 still believed in captivity.

The Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization for insurgent groups, including al-Qaida in Iraq, claimed in an Internet posting that it had killed 81 workers who were "building a new American base."

It was unclear if the group was referring to the factory kidnap victims, and the authenticity of the statement could not be verified, although it was posted on a Web site used by insurgents to post statements and videos. The same group claimed it kidnapped and beheaded two U.S. soldiers last weekend.

At least 25 people also have been killed gangland-style in the northern city of Mosul this week, with residents gunned down in ones and twos and bodies found scattered throughout Iraq's third-largest city.

Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, has a mixed Kurdish and Sunni Arab population and a tradition of bad blood. The Kurds, who are largely Sunni Muslim but not Arab, have formed a prosperous autonomous region nearby after decades of oppression and mass killings under the Sunni Arab minority that ran Iraq until Saddam Hussein was ousted three years ago.

Also Friday, the U.S. military said it killed four foreign insurgents in a raid north of Fallujah. Two of the dead men had 15 pound suicide bombs strapped to their bodies. The military said an insurgent thought to be an Iraqi also was killed in the raid, which was launched on information from a suspected arrested in the region in previous days.

Separately, the military said, it detained a senior leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and three other suspected insurgents Monday during raids northeast of Baghdad, near where al-Qaida chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. air raid earlier this month

In other violence Friday, police said:

- Gunmen killed an engineer who worked at Baghdad airport in a drive-by-shooting in western Baghdad.

- Police discovered the bodies of four men who had been handcuffed and shot. The dead men, all between 30 and 25, were found in the north Baghdad district of Kazimiyah.

- A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol in the Dora region of southern Baghdad killed a police officer and wounded four others.

- Police found the body of a man who had been shot in the head and chest in central Baghdad just after dawn.

- The bodies of two women in their mid-20s who had been shot in the head were found in an eastern Baghdad drainage canal.

- Police found the bodies of four bullet-riddled and handcuffed men wearing civilian clothes in the northern Baghdad suburb of Kazimiyah. A roadside bomb also exploded in the predominantly Shiite area, sparking a fire in two discount clothing stores.