Battle in insurgent stronghold kills 18

? Iraqi and American forces fought Sunni insurgents in an hourslong street battle Saturday in the increasingly violent city of Baqouba, as residents fled indoors under the rattle of automatic weapons fire and the blasts of rocket-propelled grenades.

City police said at least 18 people were killed and 19 wounded.

Nationwide, police and morgue officials said the death toll was 53, including those killed in Baqouba.

The city was chaotic following the fighting, and Baqouba’s police media office said it was not known how many of the dead were Sunni insurgent fighters. The Americans reported no dead or wounded among U.S. forces.

Violence in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, has skyrocketed in recent weeks, particularly after a major battle between Sunnis and Shiites in the nearby city of Balad last month. Scores of civilians in Baqouba have been killed in the violence in the past two weeks alone.

Elsewhere, coalition forces raided a Shiite militia stronghold in Baghdad searching for dozens of Iraqi hostages and combed through a rural area in southern Iraq where four American security contractors and an Austrian were kidnapped. Both efforts appeared to come up empty-handed.

Iraqi soldiers on Saturday shoot from their position on a rooftop in Baqouba, an increasingly violent, mostly Sunni city about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, Iraq. City police said at least 18 people were killed and 19 wounded.

Iraqi soldiers backed by U.S. helicopters swept through the Sadr City section of the capital after intelligence indicated that an armed group was holding some of the scores of Iraqis who were snatched from a Higher Education Ministry office building in Baghdad on Tuesday, the military said.

The Americans said the raid was conducted to rescue captives and disrupt kidnapping and insurgent cells. When asked if any hostages had been found, the military would only say, “No individuals were killed, injured or detained.”

Iraqi police said the raid began at 2:30 a.m., swept through two sections of Sadr City and wounded three Iraqi civilians.

On Tuesday, gunmen dressed in Interior Ministry commando uniforms abducted about 150 men from the central Baghdad office that handles academic grants and exchanges. The men were handcuffed and driven away in about 20 pickup trucks. About half were released on Tuesday night and Wednesday, a government minister said.

The mass kidnapping was widely believed to have been the work of the Mahdi Army, the heavily armed militia of the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.