U.S. Attack Near Baghdad Reported to Kill at Least 15

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and QAIS MIZHER

BAGHDAD, July 21 — American helicopters and warplanes attacked a Shiite area on the outskirts of northern Baghdad late Friday and early Saturday, killing at least 15 people and wounding 10, according to an official at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, who said some of the casualties were women and children.

American officials disputed that, saying that six insurgents were killed and five people were wounded when military aircraft used rockets and a bomb to attack two buildings in Hussainiya, where gunmen holed up after firing on American forces.

Altogether more than 60 people were killed or found dead in Iraq on Saturday, the Iraqi authorities said.

Celebratory gunfire killed and wounded scores of people on Saturday evening, after Iraq’s national soccer team defeated Vietnam 2-0 in Asian Cup competition in Bangkok. Two people were killed in Baghdad and at least 50 others wounded, the Iraqi police said. However, an official at Kindi Hospital in Baghdad said nine people had been killed by post-game gunfire in the capital. At least three people were killed in Basra. Tariq Aziz, the former foreign minister, was taken by helicopter from his prison cell in western Baghdad to the American military hospital in Balad on Tuesday after repeatedly slipping into unconsciousness, his lawyer told the Arabiya satellite television network.

The lawyer described Mr. Aziz’s condition as critical and called on the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to press Iraqi leaders to ensure that Mr. Aziz, who also served Saddam Hussein as deputy prime minister, received proper care. He alleged that Iraqi officials had threatened to cut off medical care and return Mr. Aziz to his prison cell.

Later on Saturday, the chief prosecutor of the Iraqi High Tribunal, Jaafar al-Moussawi, said Mr. Aziz had been successfully treated at the American hospital and had been returned to his cell at Camp Cropper.

The American military said a soldier was killed by an explosion near his vehicle in Diyala Province on Friday. An aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was stabbed to death in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Friday night, the Iraqi police said. And near Sadr City in Baghdad, a bomb destroyed a minibus on Saturday morning, killing five people and wounding eight others, the Interior Ministry official said.

American and Iraqi forces raided the Umm al-Qura Sunni mosque complex in Baghdad, detaining what the military described as “18 suspected terrorists.” The military said it did not enter the mosque itself. The head of the Sunni Endowment, Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samaraie, said in a telephone interview that his son Ammar had been arrested, and he demanded that those detained be released immediately. The endowment oversees thousands of Sunni mosques throughout Iraq.

The police discovered 17 unidentified corpses in Baghdad on Saturday.

Also on Saturday, at least 13 people were killed in the northern city of Mosul during a spate of bombings and other killings, the Iraqi police reported. Among those killed in the attacks were three Iraqi Army soldiers and one policeman.

As residents in Hussainiya dug through the rubble left by the overnight fighting, one woman in the neighborhood, Umm Ali, said by phone that the area had been cordoned off by the American military for several days. The Mahdi Army militia of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr controls the area, where American troops had recently suffered casualties, she said.

“It might be this reason why the American forces attacked us,” she said. “The Mahdi Army rules this area and never lets American forces go through it.”

Another resident, Abu Raghad, said American helicopters had attacked residents who tried to flee north. “I saw an American helicopter shoot three missiles targeting people who tried to leave,” he said.

In Najaf, aides to Mr. Sadr condemned the airstrikes in Hussainiya, which they said destroyed three houses, killing 17 people and wounding three more.

A statement by the American military said the episode began just before midnight, when members of the multinational force were attacked with small-arms fire by “unknown gunmen operating from a structure near Hussainiya.” After American forces returned fire, helicopters armed with missiles attacked the building the gunmen were firing from, the statement said.

Three gunmen fled into a nearby house, the military said. A warplane then dropped a bomb on the house, destroying it and causing “at least seven secondary explosions, likely caused by explosives and munitions stored inside the building,” the American statement said. The Iraqi police later found six insurgents dead and five people wounded, the statement added.

The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, urged the Iraqi Parliament on Saturday to limit its August vacation to no more than two weeks, in order to allow more time to pass legislation considered crucial to resolving the country’s bitter political stalemate. Iraqi lawmakers have been unable to pass major legislation on such issues as whether to allow former Baathists to hold positions of power and how to share revenue from Iraq’s oil wealth.

After its victory on Saturday, the national soccer team is headed to a match against either Iran or South Korea, which were scheduled to play each other on Sunday.

Reporting was contributed by Ali Adeeb, Karim Hilmi, Ali Fahim and Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi.