25 killed in Iraq as rockets shatter Basra calm
BAGHDAD (AFP) — A rocket attack on a coalition military base in Basra killed two civilian contractors Friday, while a retaliatory strike and separate attacks elsewhere in Iraq killed 23 others, officials said.
The two civilian contractors died when rockets slammed into the US-led coalition's base near Basra's international airport, wounding eight others, including four coalition soldiers, the military said.
Coalition forces responded with Hellfire missiles, killing six militants, the military said.
The military did not identify the nationality of the civilian contractors or the wounded coalition soldiers.
However, a report from Prague said a Czech soldier was injured in the rocket attack near the airport.
The Czech sergeant, one of 99 soldiers from the republic serving in Iraq, suffered shrapnel wounds in the arm and had to undergo an operation in a British army field hospital.
British military spokesman Major Tom Holloway said part of the main coalition base near the airport was struck by the rockets.
The attack in the port city came hours after two rockets struck central Baghdad, killing two civilians, police said.
That attack was quickly followed by a car bomb that killed three policemen and four civilians and wounded 19 others in the once upscale Mansur neighbourhood of west Baghdad, police said.
Two policemen were among the wounded, as well as two women and a child.
A roadside bomb that apparently targeted a minibus in the Al-Jadida neighbourhood of Baghdad killed another person and wounded four more, a police official said.
Officials say hundreds of rockets and mortar rounds have been fired into the city since late March, mainly from Sadr City, the east Baghdad stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia of anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The US military said Thursday's rocket attack on Basra was the first such "indirect fire" attack -- the military's term for rocket or mortar fire -- to cause casualties since March 27, two days after the Iraqi government launched a crackdown on Shiite militiamen there.
The crackdown triggered fierce resistance from the militants, mostly from the Mahdi Army, in Basra and other Shiite regions of Iraq in which hundreds of people have been killed.
In Sadr City itself, overnight gunbattles between Shiite fighters and US forces killed seven people and wounded 20 others, Iraqi security and medical officials reported on Thursday.
A security official said the clashes erupted before midnight and continued until Thursday morning.
A medic at the enclave's Al-Sadr hospital said seven bodies had been brought in.
Meanwhile, a former senior Al-Qaeda leader in central Iraq, now working in one of the so-called Awakening groups alongside US forces, survived a suicide bombing on Thursday north of Baghdad.
The suicide bomber detonated his explosives as Mullah Nadhom Mahmud's convoy was passing through the town of Dhuluiyah, some 70 kilometres (40 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraqi police Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed al-Jubburi told AFP.
Jubburi himself was in the same vehicle but escaped unhurt. He said Mahmud, 30, and three others were wounded.
