Sadr City raid kills 49 insurgents, U.S. says

BAGHDAD — U.S.-led forces reported killing 49 insurgents Sunday during predawn clashes with renegade Shiite militia members.

The fighting was the deadliest in recent months and further stoked furor among Iraqis over the heavy toll the war is taking on civilians.

The U.S. military claimed no civilians were killed or injured during the raid, while Iraqi police said at least 13 were dead, including three children and a woman. Iraqi authorities said 69 people were injured.

Television news broadcast images of caskets and grieving families in the streets of Sadr City.

The gunfights erupted after armored military vehicles, backed by helicopter gunners, arrived on the fringes of Sadr City to conduct a door-to-door sweep for a rogue militia cell leader the United States accuses of masterminding the kidnapping of coalition soldiers and other foreign nationals in May and last November.

The target of the manhunt was neither captured nor killed, the military said.

"It's the biggest raid in two months," said Karem Hellal, 45, who was out on the street when the soldiers descended on his neighborhood.

In August, the U.S. military reported killing 32 suspected insurgents during airstrikes in Sadr City.

Sirens wailed as ambulances carried the injured to the hospital. Doctors treated the injured, including children, at Imam Ali hospital, the biggest in Sadr City.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki expressed his concerns about the raid during a meeting with U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, who leads the coalition forces in Iraq.

In a statement released by the prime minister's office, Maliki promised an investigation. He called for better coordination of military offenses with Iraqi troops to "avoid such regrettable incidents," the statement said.

Emotions are still raw over the Sept. 16 shooting deaths of 11 Iraqi civilians by employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm hired by the U.S. State Department to protect diplomats.

The military said it had returned fire from machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in at least three separate gunfights in several Sadr City neighborhoods.

Sunday's raid lasted more than three hours, witnesses said, in a predominantly poor area on the fringes of Sadr City, a stronghold of Shiite militias mostly loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Sadr has called on militias loyal to him to refrain from attacks. In response, U.S. military officials have said they, too, would show restraint.

But Maj. Winfield Danielson, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq, said, "We will not show the same restraint against those criminals who dishonor this pledge by attacking security forces and Iraqi citizens."

U.S. officials declined to name the target of Sunday's sweep, who they said has sought to carry out high-profile kidnappings and has ties with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force.

In another development, the U.S. military announced Sunday that Abu Ali al-Baghdadi, leader of the Ramadi-based Army of Truth, and a voice of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, was arrested Oct. 12 in a raid at a relative's house 15 miles northwest of Ramadi.