Informant38

"...pressure him to disband and disarm..."

As the hostage dilemma continued, American troops clashed again yesterday with fighters loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad's Sadr City slum. Iraqi doctors said one person was killed and 12 were wounded, many of them children.

The battles and kidnappings in Baghdad highlight the danger even in the heart of control of Iraq's U.S.-backed interim government. Briton Kenneth Bigley and two American colleagues were seized in the capital last week, days after the capture of two Italian aid workers whose fate has been thrown into doubt by competing claims to their deaths.
"The main problem is that he has the militia," said Maj. Bill Williams of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division. "Our goal is to pressure him to disband and disarm."
U.S. warplanes blasted insurgent positions, and ground troops pushed into the sprawling Baghdad slum.
Militia fighters returned fire with machine guns, and an American Bradley fighting vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and caught fire, according to a U.S. military report. It was not clear if there were casualties.
In other violence, gunmen killed a senior official of Iraq's North Oil Co. in the northern city of Mosul and attacked an oil well near Baghdad and a pipeline in the south.

NEWSDAY/COMBINED NEWS SERVICES 24.Sep.04