BAGHDAD, 5 August 2007 — An Iraqi security chief said yesterday that US and Iraqi forces have killed the militant behind the attack on a Shiite mosque that was widely seen as the trigger for Iraq’s sectarian war.
“On Aug. 2, joint US-Iraqi forces raided a residential area around Samarra. They killed Haitham Al-Baderi, also known as Haitham Al-Saba,” said Interior Ministry operations director Maj. Gen. Abdel Karim Khalaf.
“He was killed with a group of terrorists,” said Khalaf, adding that Baderi had been wanted in connection with the February 2006 attack on the Al-Askari Mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Samarra.
“He is the head of the cell that carried out the bombing,” Khalaf said. This week more than 1,000 Iraqi troops backed by US paratroopers launched an operation to expel Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate from Samarra, where it has been accused of two separate attacks on the complex.
In Basra, British artillery fire yesterday slammed into a disused oil facility in Iraq’s southern city of Basra, causing an extensive blaze and sending thick black smoke into the air, the military said.
The strike was ordered after militiamen attacked a joint coordination center used by British and Iraqi forces in the city, and their firing point was identified, British military spokesman Maj. Mike Shearer said. “This afternoon, the multinational force returned fire against a rogue militia following an indirect fire attack on a provisional joint coordination center in Basra,” he said.
“The multinational force fire hit a disused oil facility that subsequently caught fire,” Shearer said, suggesting that “residual oil left in the area” might explain the severity of the blaze. “A decision to use artillery fire in this part of the city is not taken lightly. We identified a rogue militia firing point that was used for the attack. As a result we took the most appropriate course of action,” he said.
