NAJAF, 5 December 2005 — A crowd hurling shoes, rocks and tomatoes forced former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to cut short a visit yesterday to the city of Najaf, police officers said.
A spokeswoman for Allawi said she had no information on the incident but confirmed that Allawi, who is challenging the ruling Shiite Islamist Alliance bloc at next week’s parliamentary election, had been in Najaf during the day.
A police captain, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a large crowd of worshippers at the Imam Ali Mosque hurled sandals and shoes at Allawi. A second police officer said some of Allawi’s bodyguards fired in the air to disperse the crowd, which also threw rocks, sticks, tomatoes and other projectiles. Police also intervened to break up the disturbance, he said. Both policemen said they believed supporters of militant cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr were responsible for the disturbances, though evidence for this was unclear. “When Allawi entered the shrine, a few people, believed to be Sadrists picked up batons and threatened to attack him,” the police captain said at the scene after the incident.
“His American and Iraqi guards fired in the air when everyone started throwing shoes and sandals at him.” Other witnesses were unclear as to how far armed bodyguards had accompanied Allawi into the shrine or whether he was accompanied by Westerners, normally barred from such shrines.
On Saturday, Allawi traded accusations with the ruling Islamists as the campaign heats up for the Dec. 15 parliamentary vote.
Meanwhile, US and Iraqi forces undertook a new offensive yesterday in a town where 19 Iraqi troops were killed a day earlier, as forces wrapped up their latest operations in the restive Al-Anbar province.
US and Iraqi forces swept through the town of Al-Adhaim, 100 kilometers (65 miles) north of Baghdad, in the aftermath of an ambush on Saturday that killed the Iraqi soldiers, according to security sources.
A number of shooting incidents and roadside bombs hit Baghdad yesterday. Sheikh Abdel Salam Abdel Hussein Al-Maliki, a representative of Shiite firebrand cleric Al-Sadr, was found shot dead in his car in the southeast Baghdad neighborhood of Zayouna, a source in the defense ministry said. A bomb planted near a car in Tahrir Square in central Baghdad exploded killing two people and wounding 11 and damaging several nearby shops, according to police sources. The US military also reported an attack on one of its convoys with a roadside bomb, wounding two US soldiers.
