32 held in Iraqi crackdown

Coalition troops and Iraqi police arrested 32 people in raids in the holy city of Karbala, where rival factions of Iraq’s resurgent Shiite Muslims are vying over mosques and political power.

In Baghdad, US troops fired in the air to disperse an angry crowd at the Oil Ministry after a woman, offended by the Americans’ use of dogs, objected to a search of a bag holding the Islamic holy book.

Outside Fallujah, west of Baghdad, a US military truck was left ablaze after what witnesses said was an insurgent attack. No casualties were immediately reported in the third straight day of such attacks on American convoys and patrols.

Troops of the 82nd Airborne Division were back on the streets one day after one was killed and six were wounded in an ambush. Two civilians also were killed on Monday.

After Tuesday’s strike, US troops were seen searching houses in the area for the attackers.

Polish military spokesman Capt Andrzej Wiatrowski said the raid in Karbala, 50 miles south of Baghdad, took place before dawn against a group that seized an Iraqi official last week in a dispute over a bus, triggering armed clashes between rival Shiite factions.

An undetermined quantity of weapons and ammunition were also seized during the raid around the al-Mukayam mosque, officials said said. Troops and police later searched the home of a Shiite cleric, Khalid al-Kazemi. Three men and two women were detained for questioning, he said.

US officials said only that the targets were “criminal elements” in the city, where an American lieutenant colonel and two other US soldiers were killed last week in a clash with gunmen from another Shiite faction.

North of Baghdad, near the town of Siniya, an explosion blamed on saboteurs damaged a petrol pipeline carrying crude oil and natural gas to refineries in the capital.