BAGHDAD (AFP) — Iraq said Saturday militiamen have sown the streets of Baghdad's Sadr City with booby traps to impede the advance of the security forces, amid fierce battles in the sprawling Shiite enclave.
The warning came soon after the partial lifting of a vehicle ban that has been in force during two weeks of bitter fighting between US and Iraqi forces and the Mahdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
"Groups of people have planted roadside bombs on the majority of the roads of Sadr City," Baghdad military command said in a statement.
"For the protection of our citizens and media personnel, we are warning people to stay off the streets until they have been cleared by the security forces," it said.
Battles for control of Sadr City raged again through the night killing 13 people, according to the US military, bringing the toll in the past week alone to around 90.
The US military also announced the death on Saturday of another soldier in Baghdad, bringing to at least 13 the number of troops killed in the capital in the past week.
Residents of impoverished Shiite bastion reported that the fighting died down during the day with only occasional bursts of gunfire punctuating the calm.
They said the main road into Sadr City remained closed and major thoroughfares blocked, forcing motorists to use sidestreets to zig-zag their way through the district, which has a population of two million.
A US military statement listed the dead in the overnight battles as two snipers, two "criminals" firing rocket-propelled grenades, six gunmen wielding machine guns and automatic weapons, and three men placing roadside bombs.
The US and Iraqi forces hit back with small-arms fire, a Hellfire missile fired from an unmanned aircraft and artillery shells blasted from a M1A2 Abrams tank, the statement said.
Residents showed an AFP photographer a house in the Jamila sector of Sadr City which they said had been hit during an air strike.
Neighbours said two small children and their parents were killed and another five family members wounded in the strike.
Hospital officials said women and children were among those killed and wounded but declined to give a breakdown.
An official in the office of government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told AFP that a two-week vehicle ban in Sadr City had been eased.
"The curfew was lifted generally in Sadr City from this morning, but it still applies in some areas where security measures are in place," the official said, asking not to be named.
Tensions between the Mahdi Army and the security forces have been further inflamed by the killing of senior Sadr aide Riyad al-Nuri on Friday in an attack carried out in broad daylight after the main weekly Muslim prayers in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
Sadr has called for three days of mourning in all his movement's offices, while a symbolic funeral procession for Nuri was held in Sadr City on Saturday morning.
The US statement said Friday night's clashes began when a security force convoy was attacked "by multiple roadside bombs, and small-arms fire."
In fierce clashes that continued for an hour, Iraqi and US forces came under attack by snipers, gunmen armed with automatic weapons and machine guns, as well as by roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades.
During the fighting, US forces in an Abrams tank fired two 122mm rounds killing at least two people.
A US drone also fired a Hellfire missile at a group of people suspected of planting roadside bombs, killing three, the statement said.
Mahdi Army militiamen have been battling Iraqi troops since March 25, when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered a crackdown on militiamen in the southern city of Basra.
Around 800 people have been killed in the fighting, which first broke out in Basra but quickly spread to other Shiite areas of Iraq.
The battles subsided after Sadr pulled his fighters off the streets on March 30, but fighting erupted in greater fury a week later in Sadr City when Iraqi and US forces began new operations in the sprawling township.
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