Twenty people were killed and 50 wounded in 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 from 1am, 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 Najaf between radical scholar Moqtada Sadr's Mehdi Army and US-backed Iraqi forces, a British spokesman confirmed.
British troops clashed with militiamen for about an hour late on 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 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. |