BAGHDAD — The U.S. military fired guided missiles into the heart of Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City slum on Saturday, leveling a building 55 yards away from a hospital and wounding nearly two dozen people.
AP Television News footage showed several ambulances destroyed and on fire, thick black smoke rising from them as firefighters worked to put out the flames.
The strike, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant “command-control center,” the U.S. military said. The center was in the heart of the 8-square-mile neighborhood that is home to about 2.5 million people. Iraqi officials said at least 23 people were wounded, though none of them was a patient in the hospital.
The U.S. military blamed the militants for using Iraqi civilians as human shields.
“This is a circumstance where these criminal groups are operating directly out of civilian neighborhoods,” military spokeswoman Spec. Megan Burmeister told AP in an e-mail.
She said it’s a “complex and very difficult” challenge to strike militants when they are “putting themselves next to municipal buildings.”
Dr. Ali Bustan al-Fartusee, director general of Baghdad’s health directorate, told the AP that some of the wounded included civilians outside on their way to visit patients.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have waged street battles with Shiite militias since late March in Sadr City, the power base of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.
The Associated Press
