Sunday, November 19, 2006
U.S. and Iraqi troops searched for captives, including an Iraqi-American soldier.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraqi and American forces fought Sunni insurgents in an hours-long street battle Saturday in the increasingly violent city of Baqouba, as residents fled indoors under the rattle of automatic weapons fire and the blasts of rocket-propelled grenades.
City police said at least 18 people were killed and 19 wounded.
Nationwide, police and morgue officials said the death toll was 53, including those killed in Baqouba.
The city was chaotic after the fighting, and Baqouba's police media office said it had not determined how many of the dead were Sunni insurgent fighters. The Americans reported no dead or wounded among U.S. forces.
Violence in Baquoba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, has skyrocketed in recent weeks, particularly after a major battle between Sunnis and Shiites in the nearby city of Balad last month. Scores of civilians in Baqouba have been killed in the violence in the past two weeks alone.
Captive search
Elsewhere, coalition forces raided a Shiite militia stronghold in Baghdad searching for dozens of Iraqi hostages and combed through a rural area in southern Iraq where four American security contractors and an Austrian were kidnapped. Both efforts appeared to come up empty-handed.
Iraqi soldiers backed by U.S. helicopters swept through the Sadr City section of the capital after intelligence indicated that an armed group was holding some of the scores of Iraqis who were snatched from a Higher Education Ministry office building in Baghdad on Tuesday, the military said.
The Americans said the raid was conducted to rescue captives and disrupt kidnapping and insurgent cells. Asked if any hostages had been found, the military would only say: "No individuals were killed, injured or detained."
Iraqi police said the raid began at 2:30 a.m., swept through two sections of Sadr City and wounded three Iraqi civilians.
On Tuesday, gunmen dressed in Interior Ministry commando uniforms abducted about 150 men from the central Baghdad office that handles academic grants and exchanges. The men were handcuffed and driven away in about 20 pickup trucks. About half were released Tuesday night and Wednesday, a government minister said.
A Sunni who said he was among the hostages freed claimed the kidnappers broke his arm. He said he saw them kill at least three hostages after taking them to empty houses in the Sadr City Shiite slum.
The mass kidnapping was widely believed to have been the work of the Mahdi Army, the heavily armed militia of the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
The kidnapping has raised questions about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's commitment to wiping out the militias of his prime political backers: the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and al-Sadr's Sadrist Movement.
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