IRAQ: Basra on edge

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Tensions remained high in the southern port of Basra and its outlying areas Wednesday despite Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr’s call for his fighters to lay down their arms late Sunday. A bomb went off near a vehicle carrying the commander of the Basra security plan, Gen. Mohan Freiji, on Wednesday morning in Qublah, which is about five miles west of the city, but he emerged unscathed, a police official said . Defense ministry spokesman Mohammed Askari also survived the attack. A reporter from the US-funded Al Hurra television channel, traveling with them, was wounded by a sniper’s bullet.

Some fighting erupted in Qublah after 6 a.m. as the army carried out raids in the town, which is considered a Mahdi Army stronghold. ‘When the army conducted their first raid on a house, a group of armed men came out to start firing towards the army forces with light weaponry and launchers,’ an eyewitness said.

Pamphlets were distrributed in the city by a previously unknown group threatening suicide attacks if the Iraqi army continued to strike Mahdi Army supporters. There was no way to verify the actual idenity of the group or the seriousness of the threat. Suicide attacks have been carried out in Iraq by Sunni militants, not by the country’s Shiite majority.

— Times staff in Baghdad and Basra