IRAQ: The Iraqi government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew yesterday after insurgent gunmen set up roadblocks in central Baghdad and opened fire on US and Iraqi troops just north of the heavily fortified Green Zone.
With just two hours notice, prime minister Nouri Maliki ordered everyone off the streets of the capital. US and Iraqi forces also were engaged in firefights with insurgents in the dangerous Dora neighbourhood in south Baghdad.
The fighting along Haifa Street near the Green Zone, the site of the US and British embassies as well as the Iraqi government, was unusual in its scope and intensity.
There have, however, routinely been clashes along the thoroughfare, making it so dangerous that a sign at one Green Zone exit checkpoint warns drivers against using the street.
As the state of emergency was announced in the capital, a car bomb ripped through a market and nearby petrol station in the increasingly volatile southern city of Basra yesterday, killing at least five people and wounding 18, including two policemen, police said.
A bomb also struck a Sunni mosque in the town of Hibhib northeast of Baghdad, killing 10 worshippers and wounding 15 in the same town where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed earlier this month.
At least 19 other deaths were reported in Baghdad.
Throughout the morning yesterday, Iraqi and US military forces clashed with attackers who were armed with rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and rifles and fired from alleys and doorways along Haifa Street.
Four Iraqi soldiers and three policemen were wounded in the fighting, police Lt Maitham Abdul-Razzaq said.
The region was sealed and Iraqi and US forces conducted house-to-house searches.
Defence ministry official Maj Gen Abdul-Aziz Mohamed Jassim said nobody could go out during the curfew, which will end at 5pm local time today.
Gunmen also attacked a group of worshippers marching from Sadr City, the Shia slum in eastern Baghdad, to the Buratha mosque on the other side of the city to protest at a suicide attack a week ago on the revered Shia shrine. At least one marcher was killed and four were wounded, Lt Ahmed Mohammed Ali said.
The US military reported that two Multi-National Division-Baghdad soldiers were killed this morning when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb southeast of the capital.
Earlier in the day, a separate military statement reported that two US marines were killed during combat in the volatile Anbar province in separate attacks on Wednesday and Thursday, and a soldier died elsewhere in a non-combat incident on Wednesday. The deaths raised to at least 2,517 members of the US military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003.
Also today, 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 yesterday 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. Initial reports said as many as 85 people, including women who had taken their children to work, were seized. But industry minister Fowzi Hariri told state-run Iraqiya TV yesterday 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.