Iraqi Shiite Militia Blames U.S. As Car Bombs Kill at Least 11

BAGHDAD, Feb. 2 -- Black-clad members of a Shiite Muslim militia that battled U.S. forces nearly two years ago took to the streets of an eastern Baghdad neighborhood Thursday evening following a pair of car bombings that killed at least 11 people and wounded dozens.

The blasts -- the first of which erupted near a fuel truck, sending a billowing fireball skyward -- came minutes apart in the capital's Amin district. Along with several residents, members of the Mahdi Army, which staged two violent uprisings against U.S. forces in 2004, blamed American troops for the attacks, claiming they had not permitted the militia to police the area on its own.

"We formed two committees to protect the neighborhood because neither the Americans nor the Iraqis are able to do it," said Abu Zahra, 40, a fighter in the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. "They did not allow us and said they would arrest us if they saw us in the streets. And now, this is the result."

An incident earlier in the day also enraged Sadr's followers in Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite slum in Baghdad named for Sadr's late father. Before dawn, a U.S. helicopter was airlifting soldiers who had just detained a suspected insurgent from the group Ansar al-Sunna when it was fired on and shot back, according to a military spokesman. One woman in a nearby building was killed and three residents were wounded.

"This is one side escalating things," said Abdul Hadi Darraji, a spokesman for Sadr. "The U.S. forces intend to provoke us, but we'll be patient. Escalating doesn't serve the current political and security situations."

The attacks came on a day when the military reported the deaths of five U.S. troops in three insurgent attacks Wednesday. Three soldiers were killed on a combat patrol south of Baghdad when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb. Another died from gunshot wounds suffered in southwest Baghdad. And a Marine was killed by small-arms fire during combat operations near the city of Fallujah in Iraq's Sunni Arab-dominated Anbar province.

In more evidence of the violence plaguing Baghdad, 16 bodies of middle-age men, who had been blindfolded, bound and shot at close range, were found in the city's eastern outskirts, the Associated Press reported.

On Wednesday in Baghdad, two reporters for the satellite television channel al-Sumariya were kidnapped after a meeting with officials of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's dominant Sunni Arab political organization, police said Thursday.

The reporters were traveling in a car with two cameramen and a driver when a car without a license plate blocked their vehicle. Men pulled the reporters from their car, dragging a female reporter by her hair, and sped away, according to a manager at the station, who spoke on the condition that he not be named.

"We are a neutral TV station. We have no enemies," he said.

Journalists have been victims of a spate of recent attacks, including the Jan. 7 kidnapping of American reporter Jill Carroll, who has not been heard from since a video aired last week that showed her sobbing and clad in a traditional Muslim head scarf. More recently, ABC News anchorman Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt suffered serious head injuries in a roadside bomb attack near the northern city of Taji.

Also Thursday, U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested a correspondent for Baghdad TV, a subsidiary of the Iraqi Islamic Party. Yasir Husam was detained in a raid on Baghdad's Jihad neighborhood, according to Muhammed Dulaimi, an official with the station. A cameraman for the station was killed by Marines last month during a shootout with insurgents in the western city of Ramadi.