Iraqi forces captured militant leader after deadly Baghdad clash

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi forces backed by U.S. aircraft battled militants Friday in a Shiite stronghold of eastern Baghdad, killing or wounding more than 30 fighters and capturing an extremist leader who was the target of the raid, Iraqi and U.S. officials said.

In another operation, Iraqi troops backed by U.S. soldiers arrested a top regional commander of a Shiite militia near the southern city of Hillah, an American statement said. The moves appeared part of a crackdown on sectarian militias blamed for the escalation in Shiite-Sunni violence that has raised fears of civil war in recent months.

Sectarian attacks continued a day after a suicide car bomber attacked Iranian pilgrims near a Shiite Muslim shrine south of Baghdad, killing 12 people and wounding 39.

A series of bombs and a mortar round targeting the main Islamic weekly service struck four Sunni mosques in the Baghdad area and a Shiite mosque in northern Iraq, killing 17 people and wounding more than 50. The explosions in Baghdad defied a four-hour driving ban aimed at preventing such attacks during Friday prayers.

Tit-for-tat attacks on houses of worship have stoked tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, especially after the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, an act that triggered reprisal violence against Sunni mosques and clerics.

A Sunni cleric was abducted Friday in Baghdad, said Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samaraie, head of the Sunni Endowment, the state agency responsible for Sunni mosques and shrines.

In an angry sermon, al-Samaraie said 181 Sunni imams have been killed since Saddam Hussein's ouster in March 2003. He called for the government to disband Shiite militias blamed for many of the attacks.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, has said militias should gradually be disbanded and melded into Iraq's security forces, but he offered no specific proposals for doing so in his recent 24-point national reconciliation initiative.

The U.S. military said the raid in eastern Baghdad was launched to apprehend "an insurgent leader responsible for numerous deaths of Iraqi citizens." Iraqi troops came under fire from a rooftop, triggering a 43-minute gunbattle after which the insurgent leader was arrested. There were no U.S. or Iraqi casualties, the Americans said.

U.S. officials did not identify the insurgent. Residents of the Shiite slum Sadr City said they believed the raid targeted Abu Diraa, a commander in the Mahdi militia of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, but he apparently had escaped.