BAGHDAD - Two rockets landed near the al-Sadr hospital in Sadr City, wounding 20 people including women and children, and incinerating or damaging 11 ambulances, police and hospital sources said.
6 minutes ago
The U.S. military dismissed media reports that a well-known Mehdi Army brigade commander, Arkan Hasnawi, had died after being wounded in a U.S. missile strike in Sadr City on Saturday.
Reports of his death spread like wildfire through the slum on Tuesday, but there was skepticism among residents who saw them as a bid to fool the Americans into thinking he was dead.
U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Steven Stover said a U.S. missile strike near a hospital in Sadr City on Saturday was aimed at "special group" militias linked to Iran.
(Additional reporting by Ross Colvin, Aseel Kami, Aws Qusay and Wisam Mohammed, writing by Tim Cocks and Ross Colvin; Editing by Jon Boyle)
BAGHDAD - The U.S. military on Saturday fired missiles at a target about 50 yards away from the general hospital in Baghdad's Sadr City district, wounding more than 20 people and destroying ambulances, hospital officials said.
Dr. Ali Bustan al-Fartusee, director general of Baghdad's health directorate, told The Associated Press that 23 civilians were injured.
He said no patients in the hospital were hurt, but that some of the wounded included civilians outside on their way to visit patients, and that around 17 ambulances were damaged.
Earlier, hospital officials said 28 people were injured; the reason for the discrepancy was not immediately known.
The missile were fired from a launcher on the ground, the U.S. military said. It said in a press release that it destroyed a "criminal element command and control center" with missiles in northeastern Baghdad — where Sadr City is located — around the same time Iraqis reported the attack near the hospital.
The U.S. military also said that American forces "only engage hostile threats and take every precaution to protect innocent civilians."
Shiite extremists are known to have operated in a building next to the hospital, according to local reporters.
The attack left a crater just outside the concrete barriers of the hospital and badly damaged several ambulances and some other vehicles, AP Television News footage showed. The explosion also demolished a brick building.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have been locked in street battles with Shiite militias since late March in Sadr City, a Baghdad slum of 2.5 million people and the base of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army.
More than 100 people have been wounded in clashes Friday and Saturday in Sadr City, Iraqi health officials said
The U.S. military said Saturday that 10 militants were killed in fighting on Friday, including a sniper and a triggerman accused of planting armor-piercing roadside bombs in Sadr City and the adjacent Ubaydi area. U.S. forces used aircraft and an Abrams battle tank in Friday's attack, the military said. Iraqi health officials said about 75 people were wounded in those clashes.
U.S. soldiers killed four militants early Saturday elsewhere in Baghdad, the military said.
The American military also said Saturday that a U.S. soldier died of wounds sustained in a roadside bomb that struck the soldier's vehicle during a combat patrol in eastern Baghdad on Friday. The announcement came a day after the military said another roadside bomb attack in eastern Baghdad killed a U.S. soldier.
The fighting is part of a five-week-old crackdown by the Iraqi government and U.S. forces on Shiite militia factions. The clashes have brought deep rifts within Iraq's Shiite majority and pulled U.S. troops into difficult urban combat.
But Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, shows no sign of easing the pressure on militia groups, including the powerful Mahdi Army.
Iraqi and U.S. forces are pressing deeper into Sadr City, and al-Maliki has been seeking to increase leverage on Iran, which is accused of training and arming some Shiite militias. Iran denies the claims.
A five-member Iraqi delegation went to Tehran this week to try to choke off suspected Iranian aid to militiamen.
Meanwhile, two civilians were killed and seven others wounded in Baghdad's central Salihiyah district Friday evening after a mortar round apparently fired by Shiite extremists toward the U.S.-protected Green Zone fell short.
Shiite militiamen have used Sadr City as a base to fire barrages of missiles and mortar rounds at the Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and much of the Iraqi government.
AP Television News footage from Sadr City showed several ambulances destroyed and on fire, thick black smoke rising from them as firefighters worked to put out the flames.
The strike, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant "command-control center," the U.S. military said. The center was located in the heart of the eight-square-mile neighborhood that is home to about 2.5 million people. Iraqi officials said at least 23 people were wounded, though none of them were patients in the hospital.
The U.S. military blamed the militants for using Iraqi civilians as human shields.
"This is a circumstance where these criminal groups are operating directly out of civilian neighborhoods," military spokeswoman Spc. Megan Burmeister told The Associated Press in an e-mail.
She said it presents a "complex and very difficult" challenge for U.S. forces to strike the militants when they are "putting themselves next to municipal buildings."
Dr. Ali Bustan al-Fartusee, director general of Baghdad's health directorate, told the AP that 23 civilians were wounded in the strike.
He said no patients in the hospital were hurt, but that some of the wounded included civilians outside on their way to visit patients in the hospital. He also said 17 ambulances were damaged or destroyed.
AP Television News footage showed about 100 people milling about in the rubble of the destroyed building. A deep crater was seen just yards from the hospital, which is surrounded by 15-foot-tall concrete blast walls. It appeared that one section of the blast wall was leveled.
Windows were blown out of cars in the hospital's parking lot, but there did not appear to be any damage to the hospital itself.
Shiite extremists are known to have operated in a building next to the hospital, local reporters said.
(This version CORRECTS RECASTS lede; corrects that missiles fired from ground launcher, not helicopters; UPDATES with hospital comment, other details.)
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The US military conducted a guided rocket attack on a Special Groups headquarters adjacent to a hospital in Sadr City, while 14 Mahdi Army fighters have been killed during clashes over the past 24 hours.
The US Army targeted and destroyed a Special Groups command and control center in a Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System strike in Sadr City at 10 AM local time Saturday morning, Multinational Forces Iraq reported. "There were six GMLRS rocket strikes on these Special Groups criminal command and control nodes," Lieutenant Colonel Steven Stover, the chief Public Affairs Officer for Multinational Division Baghdad, told The Long War Journal while refuting claims that the US used aircraft to attack. "We conducted a precision strike, hopefully got a few leaders, and sent a very strong message."
The Special Groups have been using the location near the hospital for an extended period of time and US intelligence has followed the activities at this site. "We had been tracking it for some time," Stover said. "Operations made the call to hit it. There may have been damages to the hospital - broken glass. There was likely ambulances damaged; however, it was the Special Groups criminal leadership that purposely put their command and control node there."
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Cannons to the left, cannons to the right, cannons above
Bill Sweetman describes at Aviation Week how the Army, having acquired a robot air force in the shape of UAVs, is roiling the waters with the mother of all artillery concepts. And the problem with an artillery weapon that powerful is that no one wants it to be mistaken for one of the Air Force's or the Navy's toys. After all, those are real weapons.
If the USAF is upset about the Army getting its own force of armed UAVs, what about the Army's bid for the long-range strike mission?
In the May issue of DTI I take a look at the Pentagon-wide Prompt Global Strike (PGS) mission, which calls for the ability to hit a target anywhere in the world within an hour of the decision to attack.
A problem is that one of the few ways to do this is with a rocket; but a long-range rocket launch looks the same whether the payload is a J-class guided bomb or what the RAF used to call "a bucket of instant sunshine." Since nobody is anxious to trigger a nuclear exchange, the various PGS concepts are designed to be readily distinguished from an ICBM.
Faced with the need to keep the from using a high trajectory rocket, the Army came up with something even more Buck Rogers: a super-duper Mach 10 hypersonic glider. At least it isn't a ballistic missile.
The Army and its contractors won't talk about it, but AHW is a hypersonic glider launched from the Orbital/ATK booster that's used in the US ground-based missile defense interceptor. Using new high-temperature materials, the vehicle flies through the atmosphere at speeds of more than Mach 10. The system would be forward-based at sites like Diego Garcia and Guam to cover likely targets.
The AHW's big advantage is that its profile can't be mistaken for a ballistic missile. It's launched from a completely different part of the world and reaches much lower altitudes. Because it does not fly in a high ballistic arc, it also gives the target much less warning of its approach.
The reason why the Army wants this system is speed. Attack aircraft, which typically fly at high subsonic speeds, take too long to reach their target. An aircraft sixty miles away can take some time to intervene in a ground battle -- if it is that close. It takes the Army long range guided missile system (GMLRS) about a minute and a half to reach across the same distance.
This video demonstrates the responsiveness of long range rocket artillery. In the scene below, Bradleys and an Abrams tank are engaging the enemy on rooftops. First you see the thudding of the Bradley's 25 mm, followed by the much larger impact of the tanks main gun. Then in the space of a few minutes (there's a time lapse in the video), the building is hit by a 200 pound GMLRS warhead. Long range artillery intervened in a time-critical tactical situation in a way that air support often cannot.
Special operators or their allies operating inside Iran may find themselves trapped by enemy tracker teams. In that kind of tight spot, they may not be able to get manned aircraft to support them inside enemy territory. A missile can be there in minutes. Oops. I mean hypersonic glider.
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