Woman, Child Killed in Raid at Baghdad Slum

U.S. and Iraqi forces fought a gun battle in Sadr City early Sunday during a brief raid in search of a suspect wanted in killings and kidnappings.

Iraqi witnesses said a woman and a child sleeping on a rooftop were killed by stray fire in the 2 a.m. raid, and five other residents were injured. U.S. Army spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said there was no information about civilian casualties, but he added that because the military units “left the area under fire,” he could not be certain that “none were injured or killed in the crossfire.”

The raid targeted a single suspect and was not part of a broad sweep of the sprawling slum. U.S. military commanders complained last week that the Shiite Muslim-led Iraqi government had restricted large-scale operations in Shiite neighborhoods such as Sadr City.

The U.S. military also reported that two Marines died Sunday of wounds from combat in Al Anbar province.

Bombings and kidnappings resumed in the capital Sunday, a day after a surprise curfew interrupted the sectarian violence that has claimed dozens of lives most days during the summer. At least 19 people were killed in the day’s attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere across Iraq.

Armed men forced 26 workers from a food processing plant in the Amil neighborhood of southwest Baghdad and loaded them into refrigerator trucks.

Four of the workers escaped by banging on the truck walls until the driver stopped and opened the doors. They bolted as the kidnappers opened fire. The escapees, who were wounded, survived by melting into a crowd at a marketplace, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The capital also was caught up in the political fallout from the arrest late Friday of a guard at the home of a prominent Sunni Arab lawmaker.

A leader in radical cleric Muqtada Sadr’s Shiite Muslim movement called for a revamping of the Iraqi Cabinet to rid it of incompetence and terrorist infiltration. Baha Araji, who holds one of the Sadr group’s 30 seats in parliament, said the arrest Friday illustrated the “links to terrorism” in the government that were preventing national reconciliation.

U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested the guard at the home of Iraqi Accordance Front leader Adnan Dulaimi. U.S. military officials said Dulaimi was not implicated in the plot to get multiple suicide bombers into Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, which houses the Iraqi parliament and the U.S. Embassy.

Dulaimi has said the guard is innocent. In his criticism of the government, Araji also repeated a rumor that spread across the capital on Saturday of a coup attempt thwarted by the very government he proposed to reshuffle. “It failed because of the strong structures of the Ministry of Defense and the assistance of the U.S. forces,” he said.

Several high government officials have denied that there was a coup attempt.

Another member of the ruling United Iraqi Alliance coalition, which includes Sadr’s group, said Araji’s comments about the need for changes in the Cabinet did not reflect the bloc’s position.

“The UIA is talking about some reshuffling of the Cabinet, but this will not be soon,” said Haider Abadi, a member of the Islamic Dawa Party. He said some most ministries were performing well.

Also Sunday, a senior Iraqi official said authorities were closing in on the successor to Abu Musab Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq who was killed in a June airstrike north of Baghdad.

National security advisor Mowaffak Rubaie released a video showing the group’s new leader, Abu Ayyub Masri, smiling placidly as he demonstrated the construction of a car bomb.

Rubaie said Masri would soon be shown on TV, dead or alive.

“We are so close to you,” Rubaie said at a news conference in the convention center. “Your days are counted, and you will face the same end as Zarqawi.”

Masri released an audio recording last week in which he called on Iraqis to join a war on U.S. bases. But Rubaie said the insurgent leader made a mistake by killing an important sheik in the insurgent stronghold of Al Anbar province, an act that swayed other sheiks to offer their support to the government.

Sunday’s shootout in Sadr City illustrated the difficulties U.S. and Iraqi forces would face in the full-scale sweeps advocated by military officials for rooting out Shiite militias.

Military units arrived in the early-morning hours as residents were still milling in the narrow streets, as is customary during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. They detained a suspect believed to be connected to armed groups and involved in bomb attacks.

But shooting broke out. Afterward, neighbors said they found the bodies of Sukna Kareen Mizhir, 31, and Zaman Mehdi Khazaal, 10, the daughter of the homeowner.

Mizhir had left her home because of sectarian violence and taken refuge with a relative. As Iraqis frequently do on warm nights, they slept on the porch-like roof of the house. It was pocked with bullet holes and splattered with blood when neighbors arrived.

The woman and girl were buried Sunday in Najaf.

In other developments, the Army reported Sunday that a soldier died in a Humvee accident in the northern city of Mosul on Saturday. The soldier’s name was not released.

Seven bombs went off Sunday in parts of the capital, killing four and injuring at least 30, and a mortar round landed in a market in the Ur neighborhood of east Baghdad, killing one and injuring eight, police said.

A grocer in the Mansour neighborhood was gunned down in his store. The Yarmouk Hospital in southwest Baghdad said it received eight fatal shooting victims.

A car bomb exploded in a market in the town of Fallouja, about 40 miles west of Baghdad, killing five people, a doctor at the city’s hospital said.

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doug.smith@latimes.com

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Times staff writers Suhail Ahmad, Saif Hameed and Saif Rasheed in Baghdad and special correspondents in Baghdad and Fallouja contributed to this report.