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20 die as UK troops pound Iraqi militia

Four more killed in Baghdad market blast

AFP, Amara, Baghdad
Twenty people were killed and 50 wounded in overnight clashes between British troops and radical militiamen, medics said yesterday, as a week-old Shia uprising spread across central and southern Iraq.
For three hours, British jets bombed three districts of the southern city of Amara where militiamen were believed to be holed up, damaging six houses and
cutting off electricity supplies.
It was the first operation of its kind since Thursday, when heavy fighting broke out in the central holy city of Najaf between radical cleric Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army and US-backed Iraqi forces, a British spokesman confirmed.
British troops clashed with militiamen for about an hour late Tuesday when their tanks tried to cross a bridge into the city, an AFP correspondent said.
The director of the Al-Zahrawi
hospital reported six dead and 15 wounded.
An official at the Sadr General Hospital said 14 bodies were brought in -- militiamen and civilians -- along with 35 wounded, three of them children.
British spokesman Major Ian Clooney said the multinational operation "was specifically targeted against insurgent positions from
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where they continue to fire rockets and mortars against coalition bases".
"There was appropriate force in a very targeted and precise manner. The exact number of insurgent casualties is not known," he added.
The operation was carried out in consultation with Iraqi authorities, and leaflets were air-dropped to inform residents of damage caused by insurgent activities, Clooney said.
British tanks and troops were out in force in Amara after sunrise, with Iraqi police hunkered down in their bases, an AFP correspondent said.
In the southern Hussein neighbourhood, one of those bombed overnight, British forces used tear gas, witness Saad Kadhim Mohammed said.
Sadr supporters patrolled Amara, warning people via loudspeakers to stay at home and announcing that they would impose a curfew from 7:00 pm (1500 GMT).
Further north, a top official from a mainstream Shia religious party was assassinated early Wednesday in Mahmudiyah, a hotspot of Sunni insurgent attack on the road to the Shiite holy cities, a Tehran-based spokesman said.
In the central city of Kut, two Iraqi national guardsmen and three police-
men were wounded in clashes with Sadr militiamen, a doctor said.
Mehdi Army forces, armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades, fought with Iraqi National Guard and police as US planes flew overhead.
There were also clashes outside a local government building in western Kut.
Spokesman Majid Hameed said a written death threat had been delivered to the province's governor because he had refused to bow to demands from Sadr supporters that Kut secede from Iraq with other Shiite provinces of the south and centre.
Meanwhile four Iraqis were killed and 10 wounded yesterday when a device exploded in a popular marketplace in Khan Beni Saad, northeast of Baghdad, the health ministry said.
"At the moment we know that four people were killed and 10 injured," said May Abdul Karim, a spokesman for the health ministry, adding that paramedics were still collecting the wounded from the scene.
He said only that a makeshift bomb exploded in the marketplace in Khan Beni Saad, north of Baghdad on the way to the flashpoint city of Baquba, where the main Christian cemeteries for the capital are located.