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Close Adviser to Sadr Dies in U.S.-Iraqi Raid
Angry mourners follow the coffin of Sahib al-Amiri, a top aide to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, to a cemetery in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Iraq.
(By Alaa Al-marjani -- Associated Press)
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Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the top U.S military spokesman in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad that the raid was led by 35 soldiers from the 8th Iraqi Army Division Forces, with eight U.S. troops serving as advisers.
"It was an Iraqi-led, planned operation consistent with the fact that Najaf now has been passed to provincial Iraqi control and that the U.S. forces don't operate there independently," he said.
Caldwell, who declined to confirm Amiri's link to Sadr, said U.S.-led coalition forces had been gathering intelligence on him for a long time. He said Amiri was implicated in a roadside bomb attack on a police chief in Najaf this year.
"The purpose for going after him is because of the illegal activities that he was conducting, not because he was associated with any particular organization," Caldwell said.
Amiri's friends and associates called him an honorable man. "He never participated in any kind of violence in all his life for as long as I've known him," said Nasar al-Rubaie, head of Sadr's parliamentary bloc.
More than 6,000 mourners followed Amiri's coffin as it was carried to a cemetery in Najaf, about 90 miles south of Baghdad.
Sadr asked his followers to "calm down, observe self-restraint and not do anything that could inflict harm or damage on the country and the people, especially since maintaining calm and security is the responsibility of all sides."
U.S. officials and Sadr loyalists gave conflicting versions of the events that led to Amiri's death.
Amiri's 19-year-old son, Karrar Sahib al-Amiri, said Iraqi and U.S. troops knocked on the family's door at 6 a.m. When he answered it, he asked the soldiers what they wanted, he recalled. They pushed him aside and stormed into the house, he said. His mother shouted at them while his father ran to the roof. Amiri said his father tried jumping to the roof of the next house but could not.
The soldiers followed him upstairs, the son said. He said his mother asked an Iraqi soldier why they were there. "We want to question him," Amiri recalled the soldier saying.
A few minutes later, the son heard four gunshots. He found his father on the roof with a bullet in his head and three bullets in his chest, he said.
The U.S. military said the elder Amiri ran upstairs when the troops arrived to detain him, ignoring repeated warnings to stop. An Iraqi soldier and an American adviser followed him to the roof, where Amiri confronted one of them with a rifle, the military said in a statement.
Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
