Violence erupts across Iraq

12.15am UDPATE

BAGHDAD - US helicopters have blasted targets in Baghdad as a showdown intensifies with radical Shi'ite militiamen challenging America's postwar blueprint for Iraq.

Reuters journalists said they saw two Apache helicopters attacking targets in the mainly Shi'ite Shuala district in the northwest of the city, where a US vehicle was in flames.

There was no firm word on casualties in the strike on Monday, thought to be the first of its kind in Baghdad since the war that toppled Saddam Hussein nearly a year ago, but an anti-US cleric said five people had been killed and 10 wounded.

Iraq's US administrator Paul Bremer vowed to crack down on firebrand Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a day after battles in Baghdad and near the shrine city of Najaf killed 48 Iraqis, eight American soldiers and one Salvadoran soldier.

In other violence, the US army said a Marine was killed west of Baghdad on Monday, an American soldier was killed by a car bomb in the city of Kirkuk on Sunday, and another soldier was killed on Sunday in a roadside bomb attack in Mosul.

A US Marine also died on Sunday from wounds sustained in an attack the previous day. Overall, 12 US troops have been killed in combat over the past 24 hours.

Since the start of the war, 422 US soldiers have been killed in action. Thousands of Iraqis have been killed.

The violence opens a new front for US-led forces already struggling to contain attacks by Sunni Muslim insurgents.

It also complicates the task of UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who arrived in Baghdad on Sunday to discuss US plans to hand sovereignty to Iraqis at the end of June and future elections.

Bremer said Sadr was an outlaw trying to usurp legitimate authority. "We will not tolerate this," he told an Iraqi ministerial committee for national security.

Sadr responded defiantly. "I'm accused by one of the leaders of evil, Bremer, of being an outlaw," he said in a statement read out in a mosque in Kufa, near Najaf, where he is staging a sit-in.

"If that means breaking the law of the American tyranny and its filthy constitution (for Iraq), I'm proud of that and that is why I'm in revolt," the 30-year-old cleric said.

US tanks patrolled the Shi'ite slum district of Sadr City, where a hospital official said Sunday's battles with US troops had killed 28 Iraqis and wounded 74.

SADR'S GRIEVANCES

A senior US military official said the violence was not a generalised Shi'ite uprising, adding that he expected "moderate majority Shi'ites to come out and speak against this level of extremism" in the coming days.

Sadr has been angered by the arrest of one of his aides, Mustapha Yacoubi, seized by US-led forces on Saturday in connection with the killing of Shi'ite cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei last year.

Interior Ministry officials said on Monday Yacoubi was in Iraqi custody and would be tried for complicity in the murder. Sadr's group has denied involvement.

Sadr's followers are also demanding the reopening of al-Hawza newspaper, a Sadr mouthpiece that US-led authorities closed, saying it was inciting anti-American violence.

Gunmen loyal to Sadr occupied the governor's building in the southern city of Basra. His supporters also staged protests in the shrine city of Kerbala, witnesses said.

US forces sealed off the troubled Sunni town of Falluja, where four American security guards were killed last week. Witnesses reported heavy firing on the outskirts overnight and US forces closed the nearby Baghdad-Amman highway.

In west Baghdad, insurgents attacked foreigners travelling in a civilian car, detonating a roadside bomb and firing small arms. A passenger, apparently American, said he had fired back. A US Marine said no one had been hurt. The car was on fire.

Sadr had faded from Shi'ite politics in recent months while the spotlight focused on leading moderate cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and his objections to US transition policies.

But Sadr's Mehdi Army has said for months it is ready for holy war against the Americans if the order comes, and their sudden challenge shows splits within the Shi'ite majority.

In Najaf, the local leader of the Badr militia, linked to a moderate Shi'ite group, said he had helped mediate a truce between Sadr's group and Spanish-led forces after Sunday's fighting there in which 20 Iraqis were killed and 200 wounded.

Hassan al-Battan told Reuters Sadr fighters had now handed back the Najaf police station and the Badr militia's office which they had occupied on Sunday.

An aide to Sadr at the Kufa mosque said the cleric wanted US troops to withdraw from Shi'ite areas.

"It is not up to us to defuse the situation but the Americans. They started to shoot at peaceful demonstrators," the aide, Qais al-Khazali, said.

Hundreds of Sadr's gunmen milled around the mosque. Some could be seen riding around town in looted police pickup trucks, wearing blue police-issue flak jackets.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq