DIWANIYA, Iraq,8 April 2007 — US forces launched an airstrike in Diwaniya yesterday as US and Iraqi troops fought for a second day to overcome Shiite militias and bring the city back under government control. A local hospital source and a resident said six people, including two children and a woman, were killed in the missile strike on a home in the center of the city, 180 km south of Baghdad.
US military spokesman Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl said one person had been killed when a warplane fired on gunmen carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “The engagement was initiated by a tip that was called in by a local citizen. We had visual confirmation that there was a hostile target. There was no collateral damage,” he said.
Iraqi and US forces launched Operation Black Eagle at dawn on Friday to restore the government’s authority over a city where Shiite militias are a powerful and feared presence, particularly Moqtada Al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army.
The government said this week it was extending the nearly two-month-old US-Iraqi security crackdown in Baghdad to other cities as it seeks to halt a slide into sectarian civil war.
Diwaniya has been the scene of fierce battles between US and Iraqi forces and militiamen in past months.
Thirteen Iraqi soldiers were summarily executed when they ran out of ammunition and were captured during a firefight with Shiite militiamen in the city last August. The incident prompted questions about the capabilities of the new Iraqi army. The US military said two US soldiers died in separate roadside bombings in the east and west of Baghdad on Friday.
In Diwaniya, yesterday’s fighting was concentrated in five central districts and gunmen were fighting back with roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades in hit-and-run attacks, an Iraqi military source there said.
A suicide car bomber also killed five people in an attack on a security force checkpoint near Samarra, north of Baghdad. The violence came as Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshiyar Zebari, announced that a ministerial meeting between Iraq, its neighbors and world powers on stabilizing the country would be held in Egypt in the first week of May.
The meeting, a rare chance for Washington and its adversaries Iran and Syria to sit at the same table, is a follow-up to earlier talks in March.
