Reply #29: NY TImes: Iraqi and U.S. Forces Battle Shiite Militia

[FreeStateDemocrat]

By MICHAEL KAMBER and JAMES GLANZ
Published: March 26, 2008

BAGHDAD — Heavy fighting broke out Tuesday in Iraq’s two largest cities, as Iraqi ground forces and helicopters mounted a huge operation to break the grip of the Shiite militias controlling Basra and Iraqi forces clashed with militias in Baghdad. The fighting threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that has helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war.

Tuesday’s battles, along with indications in recent weeks that militia and insurgent attacks had already been creeping up, raised fears across Iraq that Moktada al-Sadr, the renegade Shiite cleric, could pull out of a cease-fire he declared last summer. If his Mahdi Army militia does step up attacks, that could in turn slow American troop withdrawals.

There were also serious clashes in the southern cities of Kut and Hilla. In Basra, American and British jets roared through the skies, providing air support for the Iraqi military. A British Army spokesman for southern Iraq, Maj. Tom Holloway, said that while Western forces had not entered Basra, the operation already involved nearly 30,000 Iraqi troops and police forces, with more arriving.

“They are clearing the city block by block,” Major Holloway said.

The scale and intensity of the clashes in Baghdad kept many residents home. Schools and shops were closed in many neighborhoods and hundreds of checkpoints appeared; government-controlled in some neighborhoods and militia-run in others. Barrages of rockets pounded the fortified Green Zone area for the second time in three days. An American military spokesman said there were two minor injuries to civilians in the Green Zone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/world/middleeast/26iraq.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Edited for attribution