Baghdad, Iraq ? A campaign against insurgents by Iraqi forces has sparked a backlash from some of the country’s Sunni Muslim leaders and could complicate efforts to enlist more Sunnis in running Iraq’s new government, drafting a democratic constitution and battling the insurgency.

Iraqi officials last week described Operation Lightning as a one-week offensive by 40,000 Iraqi security forces along with U.S. troops that would cordon Baghdad and sweep out insurgents. On Friday, with the operation still under way, Sunni leaders said their neighborhoods had been unfairly targeted.

Members of the three largest Sunni parties – the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Association of Muslim Scholars and the Sunni Endowment – condemned Operation Lightning, saying the largely Shiite Muslim and Kurdish Iraqi forces were concentrating on Sunni Arab parts of Baghdad.

“Our towns are surrounded, our people are detained and our worshippers cannot reach the mosques because of this bad operation,” said Sheik Ayad al Ezi of the Iraqi Islamic Party, who led a sermon at a joint prayer service.

Bruska Noori Shaways, the secretary general of the Iraqi Defense Ministry, said security personnel were forced to take the war to local neighborhoods – even to some mosques – because the insurgency was largely Sunni and hid among residents in Sunni neighborhoods.

“Of course, we are going to first of all concentrate on those areas,” Shaways said.

Government officials acknowledge police and security forces don’t have the intelligence they need to conduct precise sweeps in Sunni neighborhoods. When they do dragnets, innocent residents get caught up, discouraging Sunnis from embracing the new government and driving some of them toward the insurgency.

A boy stands during prayers at the Sunni Um al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad. Sunni Muslim leaders on Friday said a weeklong counterinsurgency offensive in Baghdad overwhelmingly targets members of their religious minority and has led to the detention of hundreds of people.

“The government should concentrate on building national trust between the people and the security forces in order to achieve cooperation. But the security forces are sabotaging this relationship through their random raids,” said Hazim Ali, a political science professor at Baghdad University. “If they use excessive force, it will lead to excessive violence. So far, it has not solved any problems.”

The sweep of Baghdad, which U.S. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called “an important signpost” on the way to assessing what the newly trained Iraqi forces can do, hasn’t gone according to the plan the Iraqi government announced more than a week ago.

Knight Ridder correspondents found all 23 routes leading out of the city were never closed and new checkpoints were manned sporadically and could be avoided. It’s unclear whether all of the 40,000 police and military forces the government planned to use took part. And the only neighborhoods that encountered a heavy police presence were Sunni-dominated.

Where fighting took place, it was intense. Residents in the Sunni neighborhood of Amariyah said insurgents shot in the air along residential streets, warning people to stay inside, then fought the Iraqi forces.

The government said it hadn’t finished compiling its statistics, but it appeared that attacks in Baghdad dropped this week, although attacks outside the capital rose.

Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, said Friday that security personnel had killed 28 terrorists and arrested more than 800 others.