Baghdad, Iraq – Seven Iraqi battalions backed by U.S. forces launched an offensive in the capital Sunday in an effort to stanch the violence that has killed more than 550 people in less than a month, targeting insurgents who have attacked the dangerous road to Baghdad’s airport and Abu Ghraib prison.
Aides to a radical anti-American Shiite cleric, meanwhile, sought to defuse tension between Sunnis and the majority Shiites after a recent series of sectarian killings.
Iraq’s government took the diplomatic offensive, joining the United States in its oft-repeated demands that Syria close its porous border to foreign fighters.
Today, two carloads of gunmen assassinated a top aide to Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s Cabinet and his driver, police said. Wael al-Rubaei and his driver were attacked in central Baghdad.
The slaying follows Sunday’s killing of another senior government official, Trade Ministry auditing office chief AliMoussa.
Also today, two suicide attackers detonated their car bombs near an American base in downtown Samarra, police Lt. Qassim Mohammed said. Three U.S. soldiers were injured, the military said.
On Sunday, a suicide car bomber blew himself up near a U.S. convoy and police station in Tikrit, killing one American soldier and wounding two others along with two Iraqi policemen, the military said. Also Sunday, a U.S. soldier was killed in a vehicle accident near Kirkuk, it said.
The U.S. military said the offensive in the west of the capital had been set in motion to root out insurgents, especially those who have staged bloody assaults on the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison and the notoriously dangerous road from downtown to the airport.
Without providing numbers of troops, U.S. officials said four battalions of Iraqi soldiers and three battalions of police launched the offensive with the support of an unspecified number of American military personnel, although a total of about 2,500 personnel were believed involved.
Also Sunday, three Romanian journalists and their Iraqi-American guide were released unharmed after being held captive for nearly two months. Iraqi insurgents had demanded Romania withdraw its soldiers from Iraq. Bucharest rejected the demand.
Separately, Iraqi security forces captured Ismail Budair Ibrahim al-Obeidi, a “terrorist” close to the network of the Jordan-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Tuesday in Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad, a government statement said.
The terror suspect, also known as Abu Omar, planned car-bomb attacks in Baghdad and rigged booby-trapped cars for foreign fighters, the statement said.
Senior aides of anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr met a key Sunni group in a bid to soothe tensions that have flared and resulted in the deaths of 10 Shiite and Sunni clerics in the past two weeks.
Al-Sadr resurfaced this week after lying low following fierce battles last year in Najaf and Baghdad’s impoverished Sadr City between his supporters and U.S. forces.
