BAGHDAD, Iraq – Shiite militants and U.S. forces battled Saturday in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum, and a mortar barrage slammed into a busy eastern neighborhood in a new round of violence in the capital that left five people dead and dozens wounded, officials said.
The violence contrasted with calm in the holy city of Najaf, where residents cleaned up broken glass and rubble and returned to their wrecked offices and shops after three weeks of clashes between Shiite fighters and U.S. troops.
Dozens of Najaf municipal workers were out for the first time in weeks, sweeping debris off roads lined with buildings blasted open by U.S. bombs.
Fighting stopped in the city after militants loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr filed out of the revered Imam Ali Shrine and turned over the keys to religious authorities, symbolizing their acceptance of a peace deal brokered by Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
But gunbattles broke out between militants and U.S. forces in Sadr City, a Baghdad stronghold of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.
U.S. soldiers in Humvees drove through the impoverished neighborhood with loudspeakers, demanding that people stay home because coalition forces were “cleaning the area of armed men,” according to a reporter at the scene. There was sporadic gunfire.
Saad al-Amili, a Health Ministry official, said three people were killed and 25 were wounded in the skirmishes.
As the battles raged, insurgents fired a round of mortars into a crowded eastern Baghdad neighborhood, killing two boys washing cars in a street near the former Iraqi National Olympic Committee building, said Interior Ministry spokesman Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman. At least four mortar shells landed in the area, witnesses said.
The dead teens were taken to a nearby morgue, where tearful relatives pounded their chests in grief and others hugged and kissed the bodies. At least six other people were injured, said Bashir Mohammed of Baghdad’s al-Kindi hospital.
Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes carried out airstrikes for the second straight day in the city of Fallujah, a center for Sunni Muslim insurgents who have been battling U.S. forces for more than 18 months. U.S. forces also exchanged gunfire with insurgents on the city’s eastern outskirts, and fighting was reported on the main highway that runs to neighboring Jordan.
In other violence:
* Police found the bodies of a slain Turkish truck driver and an Iraqi man late Friday on a highway near Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, a Turkish diplomat said Saturday.
* Iraqi police on Saturday mistakenly opened fire on U.S. troops, who returned fire, wounding two policemen in the northern city of Kirkuk, an Iraqi National Guard commander, Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin, said.
* Rebels blew up a pipeline inside the West Qurna oilfields in southern Iraq late Friday, sparking a fire that burned for a day. The attack will affect exports, though it was not immediately clear by how much, said a South Oil Co. official in West Qurna.
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