Insurgents attack troops after US seizes key buildings
NAJAF, Iraq -- Insurgents attacked US troops yesterday in the Shi'ite Muslim holy cities of Najaf and Karbala after American armored units in both cities moved to assert authority by seizing key buildings.
US officials insisted that their raid into Najaf -- the Americans' first deep military thrust into the city since a militia loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr all but took control of it a month ago -- did not constitute a full assault. Units of the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment captured the governor's office -- situated in the heart of the city, 2 miles from a pair of major Shi'ite shrines -- without a fight, they said.
But Sadr's militia, known as the Mahdi Army but characterized by US military officials as a street gang, quickly began to fire rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at the governor's office and at a military patrol at the edge of a vast cemetery on one side of the city. News services reported as many as 41 Iraqi deaths.
In Baghdad, a huge car bomb exploded near an entrance to the Green Zone, the occupation authority's heavily fortified headquarters on the grounds of one of ousted president Saddam Hussein's palaces.
Six Iraqis and one US soldier were killed in an inferno that sent black clouds swirling high into the clear dawn sky.
The violence coincided with the return to Iraq of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy who is laboring to assemble an interim Iraqi government to assume sovereignty on June 30. Several Iraqi political parties, some of which may lose influence after June, signed a statement declaring that his effort ''lacks credibility."
US forces have been massed around Najaf and the adjoining city of Kufa for more than a month in response to fighting sparked by Sadr and largely conducted by his militia.
Military officials so far have avoided a major assault, both to avoid the kind of protracted fight that took place over the past month in Fallujah, a Sunni Muslim city west of Baghdad, and to keep from triggering a broad uprising among Shi'ites by attacking their holy cities.
''We're not going to go wading into Najaf. We know how sensitive it is," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the military's top spokesman, said in Baghdad.
In Washington, a senior US official involved in Iraq policy said the US strategy in Najaf is to ''chip away" at Sadr's forces and create ''greater space" for local Shi'ite leaders to increase pressure on Sadr to back down.
''They need to stand up to this guy. When we start to see the snowball effect of the erosion of Sadr's support, that gives us greater space to take military action," the official said.
American tanks, armored vehicles, and Humvees wound into Najaf from a nearby US base and entered the grounds of the governor's office building. At 5:30 p.m., the Mahdi Army militia began to pepper them with rifle fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and rockets.
Earlier in Kufa, where Sadr is holed up, US troops fought the Mahdi Army along a stretch of road, residents said. At least 21 Iraqis died in the clash, US military officials said.
