Word: baghdad
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...Baghdad was on lockdown and journalists denied access to military embeds Friday morning, as the country braced against mounting chaos in the capital and in the south of the country. The Iraqi government has placed the city under a curfew, banning all civilian vehicle use, until Sunday morning. The south of Iraq, where heavy fighting between Iraqi forces and militias loyal to powerful Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has raged since Tuesday, is also under curfew. Over one hundred people are reported to have been killed, and hundreds more injured, as Iraqi forces led by Shi'ite Prime Minister...
...escalated fighting in other sections of the city, spurred by the launch of an Iraqi military operation against armed militants - many of them supporters of powerful Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr - in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites massed in three districts of Baghdad, including Sadr City - the notoriously dangerous slum and stronghold of Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army - to protest the offensive in Basra. One group of demonstrators in Khadamiya district carried a coffin with a photo of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's face and an American flag pasted...
...could be heard near the eastern edge of the Green Zone Thursday morning, and rockets landed in the neighborhoods of Salhiyya, Karada, and al-Allawi. An Iraqi police source told TIME that a car bomb had also been detonated outside a hospital in Andalus Square in central Baghdad. In the district of Khadamiya, a joint American and Iraqi force fought a gun battle Thursday afternoon against armed militants. And local media reported that unidentified gunmen had kidnapped government civilian spokesman for security, Tahsin al-Sheikli, from his home in the al-Amin district of Baghdad, setting the building on fire...
Meanwhile, Maliki traveled to Basra on Monday in a show of force against the "criminals." He has given the armed fighters 72 hours to surrender their weapons, a deadline that runs out this weekend. In the Green Zone in Baghdad, Senior British Military Representative Lieutenant Colonel Michael Shearer told TIME that the Iraqi operation is aimed at quelling criminal activity, and that the city has never been under the "control" of militant groups...
...that a suicide bomber attacked the convoy of Basra police commander Abdul Jalil Khalaf. Khalaf was unharmed but three other police were killed. Sadr supporters also clashed with Iraqi police in the southern towns of Hilla and Kut. With a curfew now in place across southern Iraq and in Baghdad, few in the Iraqi capital see a drop in the renewed violence coming anytime soon...