World

3,700 More Soldiers Moved To Baghdad

August 6, 2006 / 1:30 PM EDT / CBS/AP

U.S. soldiers sent to beef up security in Baghdad were seen for the first time on the streets of the capital Saturday as Iraqi police used loudspeakers to reassure people that the Americans were there to protect them.

But at least 21 people were killed or found dead, most of them in the capital, which is being wracked by bombings and sectarian slayings. The dead included a Shiite couple and their two daughters abducted earlier in the day in Baghdad's mostly Sunni area of Dora, police said.

With Sunni-Shiite killings on the rise, about 3,700 soldiers of the Army's 172nd Stryker Brigade were brought from northern Iraq to bolster U.S. and Iraqi security forces that have struggled to contain the violence in Baghdad.

Several Stryker armored vehicles took positions in the mostly Sunni district of Ghazaliyah, one of the city's most dangerous areas. Police used loudspeakers to encourage residents to reopen shops and go about their business normally because the soldiers would protect them.

U.S. commanders hope the presence of heavily armed American troops will intimidate sectarian death squads believed behind many of the killings and reassure Iraqis — especially Sunni Arabs — that they will be protected by Iraq's predominantly Shiite security forces.

Moving the Stryker brigade to Baghdad, however, meant drawing down — at least temporarily — the U.S. military presence in northern Iraq. The brigade was based in Mosul but had subordinate units scattered over a wide area, including routes used by foreign militants slipping in from Syria.

In other developments:

Unidentified Iraqi witnesses testified behind closed doors Sunday at a U.S. military hearing to determine if five American soldiers should be tried in the rape-slaying of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. The three of the girl's relatives also were killed in the town of Mahmoudiya on March 12 — one of the worst incidents in a series of cases alleging U.S. troops killed or abused Iraqi civilians.

Tens of thousands of Shiites thronged a Baghdad slum Friday to show support for Hezbollah as Arab anger toward Israel mounted on the Muslim holy day. Such protests have even reached Saudi Arabia, where public discontent is rare.

Two American soldiers were killed Friday in restive Anbar province west of the capital, the U.S. command said. It said only that they died "due to enemy action." At least 17 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq since July 27, all but two of them in Anbar.

Two dozen people died in a surge of violence in northern Iraq, including 10 at a soccer game hit by a suicide car bombing, police said Friday, while the country's spiraling sectarian and political bloodshed killed at least 17 others elsewhere.

Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that sectarian violence in Baghdad could throw the country into civil war.

A military prosecutor on Friday demanded that four U.S. soldiers be court-martialed for allegedly murdering three Iraqi detainees, saying they are war criminals, not heroes. But a defense lawyer said the Iraqis, who were killed May 9 in Samarra, got "what they deserved."

Fears of trouble in the north rose Friday when a car bomb killed a police colonel in Mosul, triggering a firefight between police and insurgents. Iraq's Defense Ministry and police announced that 55 suspected insurgents had been captured around Mosul after the violence.

A curfew remained in effect for a second day in the eastern part of Mosul while police searched for insurgents who escaped.

Nevertheless, provincial Gov. Duraid Mohammed Kashmoula said he was pleased with the performance of the Iraqi police, who fled their posts during a November 2004 insurgent uprising but stood their ground Friday.

"The terrorists thought that police were going to run away, but this will not happen again. We will not give them that opportunity," Kashmoula said.

The U.S. command believed the risk of moving the Stryker brigade was worth taking because of the grave situation in Baghdad, where sectarian tensions are high. Sectarian bloodshed has soared in the capital since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, which triggered reprisal attacks on Sunnis.

On Thursday, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, told a Senate committee that sectarian tension were "probably as bad as I have seen it" in Baghdad and if not stopped "it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."

Echoing the general's assessment, Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the main Sunni alliance in the Iraqi parliament, warned of the dangers facing the country.

In a statement posted on a Sunni Web site, al-Dulaimi said that events since the new government took office May 20 "confirm that Iraq will fall in the circle of a civil war."

He said sectarianism is being "fed by neighboring countries that do not want stability in Iraq." He did not elaborate, but many Sunnis point to ties between Iraq's Shiite militias and the hard-line Shiite regime in Iran.

In addition to the Shiite family slain in Baghdad, police found 13 bodies Saturday — four floating in the Tigris River 25 miles south of the capital and the rest in various neighborhoods of the city. All had been shot, and most showed signs of torture, police said.

Two mortar shells landed on a house in southern Baghdad late Saturday, killing one person and injuring two, police said.

Two low-ranking members of Saddam Hussein's former regime were shot dead in separate incidents Saturday, police said.

In Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, two bombs exploded within minutes Saturday, the first destroying a grocery store and the second targeting police and rescuers who rushed to the scene. Eight people were wounded, police said.

A U.S. soldier died Saturday of "non-hostile" causes in Anbar province west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said without providing details.