Kurdish region troubled on two fronts

U.S. Deaths

As of Saturday, at least 3,479 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

? Iraq’s Kurdish region felt pressure from two sides Saturday, as saboteurs bombed a vital bridge link to Baghdad in the south, and Turkish troops across the northern border massed for a possible strike.

“We won’t allow it to be turned into a battleground,” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday of the relatively peaceful Iraqi north, a haven for anti-Turkish Kurdish guerrillas.

Sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims raged on in Iraq’s center, meanwhile, as hours of mortar barrages killed eight people in a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad that is surrounded by Shiites, and a prominent Sunni cleric was gunned down on the street.

A series of explosions was heard in Baghdad late Saturday and state-run Iraqiya television reported that U.S. warplanes were bombarding Habibiyah, a Shiite area on the edge of the Mahdi Army militia stronghold of Sadr City. The U.S. military, which has been searching for five British citizens in the area, said it was looking into the report.

The U.S. casualty toll mounted for May, the third-deadliest month for Americans in the four-year-old war: A soldier wounded in a roadside bomb blast in Baghdad last Wednesday was reported to have died of his wounds, raising the month’s death toll to at least 127.

Tensions have heightened in recent weeks in northern Iraq as Turkey has built up its military forces on Iraq’s border, a move clearly meant to pressure Iraq to rein in the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, separatists who launch raids into southeast Turkey’s Kurdish region from hideouts in Iraq.

Turkey’s political and military leaders have been debating whether to try to root out those bases, and perhaps set up a buffer zone across the frontier as the Turkish army has done in the past. Turkey’s military chief said Thursday the army was ready and only awaiting orders for a cross-border offensive.

In an interview taped for broadcast today on ABC-TV’s “This Week,” Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, said Iraqi leaders had convinced the Iraq-based militants to cease their attacks, “and they did it.”

Al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister, ending a visit to the Kurdish north on Saturday, also sought to ease the growing tensions.

“If there are some problems, we should not rely on weapons and threats, or use violence and power because this will increase tension and deepen problems,” he told a news conference in the regional capital of Irbil.

Some 90 miles to the south on Saturday, a bomb heavily damaged the Sarhat Bridge, a key crossing on a major road connecting Baghdad with Irbil, Sulaimaniya and other Kurdish cities of the north, police reported. The attack appeared to be the latest by insurgents who have tried to cripple vital Iraqi supply arteries, including Tigris River bridges in Baghdad.

In western Baghdad, a well-known Sunni cleric, Ali Khudir al-Zind, was killed in a drive-by shooting as he walked near his home, police said.

North of Baghdad, a Sunni tribal sheik and village mayor, Rokan Mutlak al-Jibouri, whose tribe is said to be opposed to the activities of al-Qaida in Iraq, was shot to death while leaving his home for work Saturday morning, police Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir said.

In all, at least 57 people were killed or found dead.