At least 100 die as militia force Iraqi troops out of town

At least 100 people were killed across Iraq yesterday in a day of intense gun battles and suicide bombings, contradicting US military claims that the security situation in the war-torn nation was improving.

A total of 34 bodies, including seven civilians and 25 Iraqi government soldiers, were brought into the central hospital in the town of Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, after fighting between government forces and gunmen of the Mehdi Army, a Shia militia loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Fifty militiamen were also killed in the gunfight, according to the Iraqi defence ministry.

In a separate development, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into the Interior Ministry in Baghdad during the midmorning rush hour, killing 16 people, including 13 policemen, and wounding up to 62.

On Sunday, a further 60 people were killed in attacks across the country from Kirkuk in the Kurdish-held north to Basra in the south.

The latest violence was a reminder of how easily Iraq could slip back into the type of endemic sectarian violence that characterised much of the first half of this year after the destruction in February of a Shia shrine in the town of Samarra.

More than 10,000 Iraqis - the vast majority in Baghdad - have been killed in the past four months alone, a figure that would send shockwaves through the international community were it in any other part of the world.

The US military admitted that there had been a spike in violence in Baghdad, but insisted that things were improving since US-led forces launched Operation Forward Together last month in an attempt to pacify the capital.

Maj-Gen William Caldwell, a US military spokesman, said violence in Baghdad had dropped by half since July, and that life was returning to normal in some areas of the capital.

The British Defence Secretary, Des Browne, echoed such sentiments during a visit to Iraq yesterday to meet key Iraqi politicians including the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

"I recognise there are continuing challenges and I've seen some violence over this weekend which suggests there's much more work to be done," Mr Browne told a joint news conference with the Iraqi Defence Minister, Abdul Qader Jassim. "But as Prime Minister Maliki said in an interview this weekend, things are improving and the challenge is to maintain that improvement."

The intense fighting in Diwaniyah will be of particular concern to British forces stationed in the Shia-dominated south of Iraq. Reports suggested that militiamen had driven government forces out of the city and had set up checkpoints in the suburbs. If the Mehdi Army has pushed the government out of the Shia-dominated city it will be a major snub to Mr Maliki, who has promised to rid Iraq of militias.

Confronting Mr Sadr's Shia militias was never going to be an easy task. His movement holds 30 parliamentary seats and five cabinet posts, and his militiamen are well-armed and dedicated. The cleric is also undeniably popular among Iraq's Shia majority, particularly the poorer classes.

In 2004, Mr Sadr led an uprising against the American-led coalition which threatened to draw the post-Saddam government and US military into a bitter conflict with Iraq's Shia while simultaneously trying to subdue what was then an emerging Sunni insurgency. The fighting was only stopped when the head of Iraq's Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, ordered the Mehdi Army fighters to lay down their arms.