Iraqis say airstrike killed 18 civilians

A U.S. missile attack Saturday on insurgents in a town north of the capital left six insurgents dead and five wounded, officials said.

But witnesses in Husseiniya, about 20 miles north of Baghdad, said U.S. helicopters attacked three houses in a four-hour period, killing at least 18 people, including women and children. They said about 21 people were wounded in the attacks, which leveled the buildings.

The attack came after insurgents fired on U.S. and Iraqi forces from a house near Husseiniya shortly before midnight, the U.S. military said.

U.S. attack helicopters returned fire with missiles, chasing the insurgents to a second house and dropping a bomb that caused several explosions, probably from explosives stored in the building, the military said.

Iraqi police searched the area and found six insurgents killed and five wounded, the statement said.

But witnesses in the town offered a conflicting account.

“It was a war and not a response to an attack targeting them. It was a war against civilians inside their houses,” said Hazim Hussein, 30, a wholesale merchant whose house is about 160 yards from the targeted houses.

Hussein said he found body parts of women and children in the rubble of the three houses. Neighbors as far as 55 yards away were injured by flying glass and shrapnel, he said. U.S. soldiers sealed roads near the site for hours, he said.

Another witness, Trade Ministry official Ali Abid Fartusi, 36, said he saw seven or eight charred bodies, including those of children. He said residents in the mostly Shiite Muslim area had been attacked by Sunni insurgents in the east and U.S. forces in the west.

“We are between the hammer of the Sunni areas and the anvil of the American troops,” Fartusi said. “We are living under miserable circumstances.”

An official with the political organization of anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr said 17 people had been killed in the attack, including three children.

Sheik Waleed Kremawi said U.S. forces were attacking civilians to force them to expel Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia.

“They’re besieging the area,” Kremawi said, adding that Husseiniya residents were planning to demonstrate against the U.S. forces.

A U.S. military spokesman, however, said no civilian casualties were reported after the attack.

Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly, a spokesman for the U.S. military’s northern command in Iraq, said U.S. troops “take every precaution to prevent casualties among civilians.”

“Ultimately, the security and safeguarding of the Iraqi citizens is our mission, and the enemy disrupts this by shielding himself with the lives of those who want only to do good,” Donnelly said.

The U.S. military reported Saturday that a U.S. soldier died from injuries suffered in an explosion Friday in Diyala province, raising the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to 3,632, according to icasualties.org, a website that tracks deaths in Iraq.

U.S. forces clashed with gunmen late Saturday in east Baghdad, leaving five civilians dead, including two women and a child, and 11 injured, police said.

The military announced that U.S. and Iraqi forces on Friday detained a Baghdad city council member, in connection with kidnappings, extortion and killings by Sunni insurgent networks they say he was involved with, including Al Qaeda in Iraq and the New Baath Party. The official, a former Baghdad mayor, was allegedly involved in a bombing that killed 19 people in the neighborhood he represents.

Iraqi forces Saturday killed five insurgents and detained 46 suspects north of the capital in Baqubah, a Defense Ministry spokesman said.

U.S. and Iraqi forces raided the Umm Qura mosque in Baghdad, detaining 18 suspected insurgents, including Ammar Samaraie, the son of the head of the Sunni Endowment, the group said. The endowment oversees thousands of Sunni mosques across Iraq.

An aide to Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was fatally stabbed Friday night near the cleric’s office in the southern holy city of Najaf, Sistani’s office said. Sheik Abdulla Falak, who manages tithes, was stabbed at 9 p.m., in his office near Sistani’s headquarters.

Former Iraqi Deputy Premier Tarik Aziz, 71, a top Christian official in Saddam Hussein’s regime, was hospitalized briefly Friday, according to Head Prosecutor Jaafar Mousawi. Mousawi said Aziz had slipped and hit his head in Camp Cropper, the U.S. prison where he has been held since his capture after the U.S.-led invasion. Aziz was taken to a U.S. military hospital, treated, released and allowed to call his family, Mousawi said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki accepted an invitation Saturday to meet with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, probably before September, to discuss joint efforts to crack down on the militant separatist Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK, according to Maliki spokesman Ali Dabbagh.

Scattered violence was reported across Iraq on Saturday.

Gunfire in celebration of the Iraqi soccer team’s victory in its Asian Cup quarter-final game against Vietnam in Bangkok left at least five people dead and 24 injured. Among them were a woman and two children, according to officials at Baghdad’s Kindi Hospital.

Mortar fire left eight people dead and 14 injured in east Baghdad, while in south Baghdad, gunmen killed one person and injured two. Baghdad police recovered 17 bodies.

A car bomb exploded near an ice factory in Mahmoudiya, south of the capital, killing one person and injuring five.

The body of a policeman who was kidnapped Friday was recovered in the southern city of Diwaniya.

A bomb planted inside a body dumped on a road outside the northern city of Kirkuk exploded, killing a police officer and his brother. In the nearby town of Hawija, a police officer was killed in a drive-by shooting at the marketplace.

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

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Times staff writers Raheem Salman, Wail Alhafith and Said Rifai, and correspondents in Baghdad and Kirkuk contributed to this report.