Senior Sadr aide shot dead in Iraq
The assassination of a confidante of the Shiite cleric prompts police to enforce a curfew in Najaf. 15 are killed in Baghdad and Basra.
NAJAF, IRAQ -- A senior aide to Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr was shot dead outside his home today in the shrine city of Najaf, prompting local police to enforce a curfew in the religious community.
The assassination raised tensions inside Iraq's majority Shiite population, which has been roiled by more than two weeks of violence in Baghdad and the southern port of Basra. The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, backed by U.S. troops, has battled gunmen, many of them affiliated with Sadr's movement, as the prime minister seeks to assert his authority around Iraq.
Hours before the assassination, a pair of airstrikes claimed the lives of 12 people inside Mahdi Army strongholds in Basra and Baghdad. Separately, a rocket tore into a room of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad but caused no casualties, police said. A second rocket fell short and killed three and wounded seven others outside the Palestine, police said. The hotel falls in the pathway of mortars and rockets aimed across the Tigris River at the Green Zone, seat of the Iraqi government and the U.S. embassy.
In Najaf, a car opened fire on Riyadh Noori, whose sister was married to Sadr's brother Murtada, as he returned home from Friday prayers. Noori was a confidante of Sadr, involved in negotiations last year with the Mahdi Army's main rival, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, after the sides clashed last summer in Karbala.
But Noori was considered a controversial figure He was suspected of involvement in the April 2003 murder of Sayed Majid Khoie, the scion of a Shiite religious family that rivaled the Sadrs. Khoie had returned to Najaf with help from the Americans and was visiting Najaf's Imam Ali shrine, when a crowd beset him. Gunmen assassinated another Sadr follower, Yasser Mudafer, suspected of involvement in the 2003 killing in January.
The Najaf police quickly called a curfew in the city, mindful of the ongoing violence in Baghdad and Basra involving the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi government.
In Basra, an airstrike killed six people and wounded one other in the district of Hayaniya, the British military said in a statement. The aircraft was called in after Iraqi soldiers came under fire in the area, considered a Mahdi Army redoubt. U.S. airstrikes against suspected fighters in Basra have been carried out on a frequent basis in the last two weeks.
Meanwhile, a U.S. drone fired off a hellfire missile late Thursday in Baghdad's Sadr City at a group of suspected fighters toting rocket-propelled grenades. The missile killed six, the U.S. military said in a statement.
ned.parker@latimes.com
