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Sunni Insurgents Battle in Baghdad
Iraqi soldiers search a car at a checkpoint on a major road in the Sadr City neighborhood in Baghdad on Wednesday May 30 2007. Iraqi and U.S. forces conducted raids in the neighborhood in the early morning, apparently searching for five British men abducted from a nearby building on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)
(Karim Kadim - AP)
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Al-Qaeda in Iraq then attacked a mosque associated with the Islamic Army, killing the group's leader, Razi al-Zobai, and four other fighters, complaining in a statement that the Islamic Army had become involved in the political process in Iraq, residents said. In retaliation, the Islamic Army attacked a mosque associated with al-Qaeda in Iraq, killing one of the group's leaders, known as Sheik Hamid, and four other members, including Waleed Saber Tikriti, a doctor who treated al-Qaeda in Iraq's wounded, residents said.
On Thursday, al-Qaeda in Iraq reinforcements arrived from other Baghdad neighborhoods, residents said, and furious fighting erupted between the groups, lasting about four hours. Nine fighters from al-Qaeda in Iraq and six from the Islamic Army were killed, according to Abu Ahmed al-Baghdadi, an Islamic Army leader reached by telephone. He said six civilians were injured by a mortar round fired by al-Qaeda in Iraq "criminals."
Baghdadi said about 40 members of al-Qaeda in Iraq fought a force of 30 fighters from the Islamic Army and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, another Sunni insurgent group. The latter two groups were aided by local residents who oppose al-Qaeda in Iraq, he said.
Despite being outnumbered, the Sunni insurgent leaders asserted, they had a significant advantage over al-Qaeda in Iraq because its members were staying in abandoned Shiite houses that were well known, while the Sunni insurgents were blended among the population.
Late Thursday, a senior Iraqi army official in Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Qasim Atta, said on state-run al-Iraqiya television that calm had returned to the neighborhood.
The U.S. military, meanwhile, announced that five American soldiers were killed in three roadside bombings in the capital on Monday and Wednesday, and one soldier died Tuesday from a "non-battle" cause.
May is now the third-deadliest month of the war for U.S. forces in Iraq, with 123 deaths, or an average of four U.S. fatalities per day. The worst month for fatalities was November 2004, when 137 troops died.
The U.S. military reported that eight U.S. soldiers and three Iraqi civilians, including a child, were injured in the Adhamiyah area of northern Baghdad on Wednesday when a suicide bomber exploded his car at a checkpoint.
An Associated Press Television News cameraman was shot and killed in Baghdad on Thursday while walking to a mosque near his home in Amiriyah on his day off, the AP reported. Saif M. Fakhry, 26, was the fifth AP employee to die violently in the Iraq war and the third killed since December.
Other Washington Post staff contributed to this report.
