US helicopters strike high-rises in Baghdad battle
Source: Reuters
(Updates with U.S. Senate panel vote) By Ross Colvin and Ahmed Rasheed BAGHDAD, Jan 24 (Reuters) - U.S. helicopters battled gunmen holed up in Baghdad high-rises on Wednesday, fighting to regain control in the city's center on a day that a key U.S. Senate committee voted against President George W. Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq. In Washington, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee brushed aside Bush's plea to give his new war strategy a chance and voted 12-9 for the resolution against his plan to add 21,500 troops in Baghdad and Anbar province, heartland of the Sunni Muslim insurgency. Only one member of Bush's Republican party, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, who had accused the Bush administration of playing "ping-pong" with American lives, broke ranks to vote for the resolution, due for a vote by the entire Senate next week. The non-binding measure says the troop increase is not in the U.S. national interest. The vote came only hours after Bush laid out his case for his Iraq plan to the public and a joint session of the U.S. Congress in his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday night and called on lawmakers for their support. "On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of the battle. Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory," Bush said. In Baghdad, 30 insurgents were killed and 35 detained during gunbattles, Iraq's Defense Ministry said, in what the U.S. military said was a fight to control a major street cutting through the city's heart. The U.S. military said a U.S. soldier was killed in central Baghdad but would not say whether it was during the clashes. 'TERRORISTS' U.S. and Iraqi troops backed by Apache attack helicopters and armored Stryker vehicles firing heavy machine guns fought militants in Haifa Street in a battle that began around daybreak, U.S. military spokesman Major Steven Lamb said. U.S. troops fired mortars after coming under machinegun, mortar and rocket-propelled grenade attack during the operation to restore Iraqi security control of the Sunni insurgent stronghold, within 2 km (1.2 miles) of the Green Zone, the heavily fortified compound housing Iraq's government. "A lot has been coming from high-rise buildings. We are firing at terrorists in those buildings," Lamb told Reuters. He had no details on casualties, but a local resident said he had counted the bodies of six men. A journalist said he helped transport 37 wounded people to a hospital, including women and children, in three ambulances that managed to get through the security cordon. Haifa Street, built by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, runs along the west bank of the Tigris River. Helicopters circled overhead amid the repetitive thud of mortar fire. U.S. and Iraqi forces said they had killed more than 100 militants in the area two weeks ago. The Iraqi government said then Haifa Street was riddled with "terrorist hideouts" and that it had captured many foreign Arab fighters linked to al Qaeda in that operation. The U.S. military said Wednesday's mission was "not an operation designed solely to target Sunni insurgents, but rather aimed at rapidly isolating all active insurgents and gaining control of this key central Baghdad location." Battling growing Sunni-Shi'ite violence, Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has announced a major security plan for Baghdad, vowing to crack down on violence on all sides. But his aides stress it has not yet started. The 21,500 additional U.S. troops would bolster new crackdown, and the Bush administration says it would not be swayed by the Senate resolution. "It won't stop us," Vice President Dick Cheney told CNN. "We are moving forward ... in terms of this effort, the president has made his decision." Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the foreign relations committee and a 2008 presidential hopeful, said the resolution was "not an attempt to embarrass the president." He said the measure might be rewritten to attract more Republicans who have soured on the war. The Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni clerics group, condemned Wednesday's Haifa Street operation as "a campaign of genocide." And in the United States, anti-war protesters planned to converge on Washington on Saturday to pressure Congress to bring U.S. troops home.(Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell, Steve Holland and Tabassum Zakaria in Washington, and Ahmed Rasheed, Aseel Kami and Alastair Macdonald in Baghdad)
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