BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S.-led coalition said it killed 30 fighters in a battle Sunday with the country's most powerful Shiite militia amid growing American impatience with the Iraqi government's inability to stop militias responsible for escalating sectarian violence.

Iraqi troops patrol the streets of Diwaniyah, 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Baghdad Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006. U.S. and Iraqi troops battled the country's most powerful Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, in Diwaniyah Sunday for several hours. [AP]

 

The clash was the second with the Mahdi Army in the predominantly Shiite southern city of Diwaniyah in as many months. Officials from the party of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which heads the militia, denied any of their fighters were killed.

A U.S. Abrams tank was seriously damaged when it was hit by rocket-propelled grenades, but no casualties were reported among the U.S. or Iraqi forces.

However, the military announced the deaths of five U.S. troops elsewhere in the country. Two soldiers were killed Saturday, one in the capital and the other northwest of Baghdad while three Marines were killed Friday in western Anbar province, the military said without elaborating.

The deaths brought to 29 the number of Americans killed in Iraq this month, many of them in Baghdad as part of a district-by-district crackdown aimed at reducing mounting violence by clearing the city of weapons and fighters.

At least 14 Iraqis also died in other violence around the country Sunday, including a Shiite woman and her young daughter who were killed when gunmen opened fire on their minivan in Baqouba, northeast of Baghdad. The driver also was killed, and the woman's husband and her brother were wounded.

Police also found 51 bullet-riddled bodies in various parts of Baghdad during a 24-hour period ending Sunday morning, police 1st Lt. Mohammed Khayoun said. They were all apparent victims of the sectarian death squads that roam the capital, with many of the bodies showing signs of torture.

The U.S. has shown increasing impatience with the failure of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to rein in militias fueling the Shiite-Sunni killings that many believe now pose a greater threat to Iraq's stability than al-Qaida or the anti-U.S. insurgency.

Sunni leaders accuse al-Maliki of hesitating to take action against Shiite militias because many of them, like the Mahdi Army belong to political parties that his government relies on for support. Al-Sadr's party holds 30 of the 275 seats in parliament and five Cabinet posts, and the cleric's backing helped al-Maliki win the top job earlier this year.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders a blunt assessment during a visit to Iraq this past week, telling them the violence cannot be tolerated and they have to act.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, gave a starker warning following his own visit to Iraq, saying if violence does not abate in the next two or three months, Washington should make "bold decisions" on what to do next.

U.S. troops have been quietly launching raids on key al-Sadr loyalists and Mahdi Army members in the past week, members of al-Sadr's party have said. The U.S. has announced numerous arrests during the Baghdad sweep, but has not specified what group they belong to so exact numbers could not be determined.

Al-Sadr loyalists, meanwhile, have accused the Americans of trying to start a wider fight with the militia. U.S. troops and the Mahdi Army fought major battles twice in 2004.

"The Americans are creating pretexts to provoke us and drag us into confrontation," said Fadhil Qasir, a spokesman for the Mahdi Army in Diwaniyah.

The fighting in Diwaniyah, about 80 miles south of Baghdad, broke out after U.S. and Iraqi troops entered the city looking for Mahdi Army members responsible for the execution-style killings of 11 Iraqi army troops in August. The slayings provoked a fierce fight at the time between the militia and Iraqi forces that left 23 troops and 50 militiamen dead.

Coalition forces raided the house of Kifah al-Greiti, a Mahdi Army commander, early Sunday, prompting a fierce battle with militiamen that lasted several hours, Iraqi Army Capt. Fatiq Ayed said. The U.S. military said up to 10 teams of militiamen with rocket propelled grenades attacked the Iraqi and U.S. troops.

Later, U.S. troops barricaded off entrances to the area to prevent militia reinforcements from entering. The military said 30 militiamen were killed, but Qasir rejected the claim.

The military also said the target of the raid was captured, along with three other people. However, both police and the militia said al-Greiti had not been arrested, and it was not immediately clear who the captured suspect was.

Sheik Abdul-Razzaq al-Nadawi, head of al-Sadr's office in Diwaniyah, said the movement had negotiated an arrangement with the prime minister's office that U.S. troops would not enter Mahdi Army neighborhoods in the city, and that the presence of U.S. troops overnight had provoked the clashes.

"We don't attack, but when we are attacked, we respond," he said.

Elsewhere, authorities in Kirkuk ended a security sweep aimed at getting rid of weapons in the northern city, which has seen escalating violence in past weeks. An all-day curfew imposed Saturday during the crackdown was lifted.

The troops arrested some 150 suspected insurgents and seized 380 assault rifles and 200 pistols in the house-to-house searches, police Brig. Sarhat Qadir said. The sweep began in mainly Kurdish areas in the north of the city, then moved down into the south and west of the city, where the Sunni Arab population is centered.

Kirkuk, a major oil center, is at the center of a struggle for power between Sunni Arabs and ethnic Turkmen and Kurds, who claim the city as their own and want it eventually to be included in their self-rule enclave to the north.