Violence dips during crackdown
2006-06-15 10:16
Hamza Hendawi
Baghdad - Government forces have fanned out across Baghdad since Wednesday morning, setting up checkpoints and frisking motorists in a major security operation to crackdown on violence in the capital.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki promised the crackdown would not target any ethnic or sectarian group, opening the door on Wednesday for talks with insurgents opposed to the country's political process, but he said any negotiations would exclude terrorist groups.
US President George W Bush, back in Washington after a surprise visit to Iraq, said the crackdown offered the promise of reducing the violence that has plagued the capital.
Just one car bombing
The only reported clash between army troops and gunmen in Baghdad occurred just before noon in the Azamiyah neighbourhood, when heavy exchanges of gunfire shattered the late morning quiet and sent residents, including women and children, scurrying for cover.
Overall, violence dipped slightly in the capital on Wednesday, with just one car bombing killing four and wounding six. Another four people died in separate shooting incidents around Iraq.
Many stores were shut in Azamiyah and Dora, both strongholds of the Sunni Arab insurgency. Entire streets looked virtually deserted in Dora, including one residents have dubbed "death road" because of the frequent clashes there between insurgents and police.
'We have had enough'
"If this security plan really works, then perhaps I will be encouraged to go out of my neighbourhood," Mohammed Yehia, a 30-year-old father of two, said at the marble-tiled plaza outside the Grand Imam Abu Hanifa mosque in Azamiyah.
Yehia said fears of being killed by Shi'ite militants have prevented him from venturing out of Azamiyah since the February 22 destruction of a revered Shi'ite shrine - an attack which unleashed the worst and longest bout of sectarian violence since Saddam's ouster.
"It has been three years," said Yehia, who makes a living doing odd jobs at the Grand Imam mosque. "We have had enough. We are all yearning for normal lives."
Crackdown
Operation Forward Together, involving 75 000 Iraqi army and police forces backed by US troops, began at a crucial time - one day after Bush visited Baghdad to reassure Iraqis of Washington's continued support and exactly a week after the death of terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
It was also the first major action by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki since his new government of national unity was sworn in on May 20, and a week after he gained the consensus he needed from Iraq's ethnic and sectarian groups to fill three key posts - defence, interior and national security.
Tackling Baghdad's tenuous security has been the aim of several past counterinsurgency operations - including one a year ago. That operation, code-named Lightning, failed to have any impact on the bombings, shootings and killings that have become daily fare in Baghdad.
- AP