International Herald Tribune
05-22-2004
Fierce fighting erupted on Friday between American forces and insurgents loyal to the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr near two shrines in this holy city, killing at least 21 insurgents, U.S. military officials said. Many of the insurgents were killed near the shrines, said Colonel Pete Mansoor, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division. The U.S. military also said it had released 454 more detainees from the Abu Ghraib prison as part of a program to drastically reduce inmate numbers. And American-led coalition forces captured four people suspected of involvement in the slaying of Nicholas Berg, the American communication specialist whose death was recorded on videotape and broadcast on the Internet. Two of the suspects were released after questioning and the other two remain in custody, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, a U.S. military spokesman said. ''We have some intelligence that would suggest they had knowledge, perhaps some culpability, but we're not going to know until we've actually finished the questioning,'' Kimmitt said, adding that he did not have any information about the suspects' identities. The fighting in Karbala erupted early Friday as a company of tanks began rolling past the shrine area on their way back to Camp Lima, a military base on the city's outskirts. Insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at them. One M-1 Abrams tank fired at a building northeast of the shrine of Abbas with its powerful 120-millimeter main gun. An AC-130 Spectre gunship pounded the area with 40-millimeter cannons. Insurgents with rocket-propelled grenades had been holed up in a school northeast of the shrines. Military intelligence indicated that many of the fighters might have come from outside Karbala, the military said. The AC-130 opened fire on the school and other buildings. The police chief of Karbala said scores of fighters had been killed in the attack. Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite television network based in Dubai, said one of its drivers had been killed by gunfire while with a television crew on the roof of a hotel in the city center. In a statement, the network said the driver, Rashid Hamid Wali, had been ''martyred'' while helping to report on the clashes between U.S. forces and Sadr's militia. The fighting came on a day when hundreds of worshipers poured into two holy Shiite shrines in Karbala to listen to clerics demand an end to the bloody fighting between the American forces and the insurgents loyal to Sadr. Clerics called for the withdrawal of fighters from each sides, but carefully avoided singling out either Americans or Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army. Sadr, who lives in the nearby holy city of Najaf, has been leading a six-week revolt against the occupation forces. His militia consists mostly of impoverished young men, many from the sprawling slum of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad. At Friday prayers in nearby Kufa, Sadr told 1,500 worshipers, ''Don't let my killing or arrest be an excuse to end what you're doing, supporting the truth and standing up to the wrong.''
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