BAGHDAD, 4 June 2005 — Eighteen Iraqis including a Shiite cleric died in the country’s latest round of unchecked violence as security forces pressed on with an operation yesterday to root out insurgents in the capital, Baghdad, sources said. Five people, including a child and two Iraqi soldiers, were killed in several attacks north of the capital early yesterday, security forces said.
In Samarra, insurgents took on a police rapid reaction force in a firefight that killed the child and one other person, while 10 Iraqis were killed and 12 wounded late Thursday in an attack north of Baghdad, the US military said.
“There was a suicide car bombing outside a home near Balad late Thursday. Ten Iraqis were killed and 12 wounded,” said Maj. Wes Hayes. An Iraqi translator working for the US military was also gunned down near Balad yesterday, police said.
In southern Iraq, gunmen killed Shiite cleric Ali Abdel Hussein in Basra overnight, his son said. “Two men armed with pistols shot my father last night” near a mosque in a northern neighborhood, Mohammed Ali Abdel Hussein said. “I chased them and they shot at me too.”
Violence in the ethnically tense northern oil hub of Kirkuk continued, with the assassination of Turkman police Gen. Sabah Bahlul Goralton as he left Friday prayers, police said.
His death followed that late in May of Kurdish police general Ahmad Saleh Al-Baranzanchi who was murdered there in an attack claimed by the Al-Qaeda-linked militant group Ansar Al-Sunna. Inhabited by Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Turkmen, Kirkuk was heavily Arabised under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
