Region | Iraq
Najaf under curfew after Al Sadr aide is killed
Three dead as missile rips hole in Baghdad's Palestine Hotel which houses international media.
- Agencies
- Published: 18:42 April 11, 2008
- US soldiers from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment clear their weapons before entering their camp after a mission in Baghdad on Thursday.
- Image Credit: Reuters
Najaf: Iraqi police imposed a curfew to prevent an outbreak of violence in the southern Shiite holy city of Najaf on Friday, after a senior aide to anti-American cleric Moqtada Al Sadr was shot dead.
A missile ripped a hole in the second floor of the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad, killing three civilians outside the hotel, police said.
The hotel, sited across the Tigris River from the Green Zone diplomatic and government compound, houses some international media but is largely vacant. The Associated Press, which has TV staff in the hotel, said none of its people were hurt.
In Najaf, police set up roadblocks and drove through the city with loudspeakers ordering shops closed and people off the streets, a Reuters reporter said, after Ryadh Al Nouri, a top Sadr aide whose sister is married to the cleric's brother, was gunned down.
"We have lost a beloved friend and brother to our hearts. The occupation had its hand in this crime in some way," aide Abdul Hadi Al Mohammadawi quoted Al Sadr as saying in a speech at the cemetery where Al Nouri was buried. "His eminence [Al Sadr] calls for calm and not to drift into strife."
US and Iraqi forces have clashed repeatedly with Al Sadr's Mahdi Army since March, when Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki launched a crackdown on the militia in the southern city of Basra.
Basra has been relatively quiet since Al Sadr called his fighters off the streets of Iraq's second largest city nearly two weeks ago.
In the early morning hours of Friday, however, Iraqi troops were fired upon when they tried to enter the northern Basra district of Hayaniya, a Mahdi Army stronghold, police said.
Blockade
A US aircraft retaliated with an air strike that killed six people and wounded one, said British Major Tom Holloway, a spokesman for US and British forces in southern Iraq.
Sadr City has been the focus of intense street battles over the past week that have killed close to 100 people. The slum is under a vehicle blockade, due to end today, that has led to food and medicine shortages.
Maliki has threatened to exclude Al Sadr's movement from participating in provincial elections this year unless he disbands his militia and turns over weapons. But in a Mahdi Army statement read over loudspeakers in Sadr City mosques on Thursday, the militia was defiant.
"They want us to disarm, but they are seeking to take away the dignity and honour of the Iraqi people," it said.
"They want to turn Iraq into another Palestine, but we say to the tyrants that we will not abandon our weapons. Allahu Akbar [God is Greatest]."
Street fighting that has been raging in Sadr City since Sunday has eased somewhat in recent days and fewer mortars have been landing in the Green Zone.
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