Security takes shape in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq | Iraqi police took over Shiite militia checkpoints Thursday at entrances to Baghdad’s Sadr City slum, one of many signs that the city’s new security plan was beginning to take effect.

More Iraqi and American troops were on the streets, new barricades were in place and raids were under way across the city. Residents trying to leave their neighborhoods found new checkpoints, newly resurrected concrete blast walls, and Iraqi troops and police lined up on roads.

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces stormed the Health Ministry and arrested the No. 2 official, accusing him of diverting millions of dollars to the biggest Shiite militia and allowing death squads to use ambulances and government hospitals to carry out kidnappings and killings.

Shiite politicians allied with anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr denounced the arrest of Deputy Health Minister Hakim al-Zamili as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and demanded that the prime minister intervene.

But Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki remained silent. Al-Maliki, a Shiite, is under strong U.S. pressure to crack down on Shiite militias and has pledged not to interfere in the operation to rid Baghdad’s streets of gunmen from both Islamic sects.

It was unclear whether the new plan would have a lasting effect. In Sadr City, for example, residents said the militiamen had gone into hiding and would return. The Iraqi police have operated under the Shiite militiamen’s control and had jointly manned checkpoints with al-Sadr’s forces.

It was unknown how many of the more than 10,000 additional Iraqi troops in Baghdad had come from outside the capital, but at least 3,000 U.S. troops of the more than 20,000-troop buildup were in place. Their numbers have grown slowly but steadily in the last few days.

Iraqi and U.S. forces and Humvees surrounded Yarmouk, a mainly Sunni neighborhood west of the Tigris River. The road to the local hospital was blocked. An elderly man searched for a way in for medical treatment but was turned away by security forces.

American officials had long complained that al-Sadr’s followers were transforming hospitals into bases for his Mahdi Army militia and were diverting medicine from state clinics to health-care facilities run by the cleric’s movement.

The main road of the Amil neighborhood in southwest Baghdad, which is mostly controlled by the Mahdi Army, was crowded with a mix of Iraqi commandos and U.S. Army checkpoints.

Every few hundred yards, a Humvee filled with U.S. or Iraqi troops waited behind trees or pedestrian bridges. Iraqi soldiers directed residents through detours.

The arrest of al-Zamili is considered likely to add new strains to al-Maliki’s fragile coalition as it seeks to curb violence in Baghdad. Shiite politicians persuaded al-Sadr to pull his militiamen back from the streets in the run-up to the security campaign.

But a series of bombings and suicide attacks on Shiite civilians in Baghdad and the southern city of Hillah has led many Shiites to complain that U.S. and Iraqi forces have not launched the campaign fast enough to protect them from Sunni extremists.

Despite recent efforts, the violence showed little signs of receding.

At least 104 people were killed or found dead Thursday in Iraq, including at least 10 Sunni men gunned down in the village of Rufayaat.

In the day’s deadliest attack, a car bomb exploded at a food market in the predominantly Shiite town of Aziziyah, 35 miles southeast of Baghdad, killing 20 people and wounding 45, police said.

Also Thursday, the U.S. announced that four U.S. Marines were killed the day before in fighting in Anbar province. At least 3,114 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to a count by The Associated Press.