Iraqi troops pour into Baghdad Shia stronghold

BAGHDAD - Iraqi troops poured into the Baghdad Shia stronghold of Sadr City on Tuesday without resistance from militiamen who have been fighting deadly street battles with US forces for weeks.
Large numbers of heavily armed soldiers fanned out in Sadr City for the first time in the eight weeks since heavy fighting broke out between loyalists of the anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and American security forces.
Baghdad security officials said they launched "Operation Peace" at dawn to clear the area where mines had been planted by militiamen.
The Iraqi troop action in Sadr City is in line with a truce deal reached earlier this month between the government and Sadr's movement aimed at ending deadly street battles which first erupted in late March.
"Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers are deployed in different sectors of the city," an officer leading a unit of armoured vehicles told AFP. He said troops had already removed several mines from the city.
"The citizens are cooperating with the Iraqi forces, they welcomed our presence. There were no attacks that targetted the Iraqi military. The situation is peaceful."
An AFP reporter in Sadr City said residents were welcoming the soldiers who began spreading out in to the teeming slum district of northeastern Baghdad while American soldiers remain on guard outside.
No gunfire was heard for the first time in weeks, when residents ran the risk of getting caught up in the crossfire between the militia and the American troops.
Streets were crowded with people going about their daily life among the ruins of dozens of buildings which had taken the brunt of the fighting.
Much of the fighting was centred around a huge concrete wall that the US military was building to cut off one third of the Sadr City in a bid to prevent the flow of heavy weapons to the rest of Baghdad.
The Americans had said that they had completed about 80 percent of the work on the wall which became a key issue for the militia men who constantly attacked those working on the construction under tight US protection.
The US military had directed heavy aerial attacks against targets inside Sadr City. Residents claimed that civilians were affected by the firing, but the Americans maintained they used precision bombing to get their targets.
Hundreds of people have been killed in fighting in the Sadr City, home to about two million people, since Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ordered a crackdown on militias in the main southern city of Basra in late March.
The fighting spread across Shia areas of Iraq, particularly Sadr City, a bastion of Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
Both US military and Iraqi officials had reported a marked scaling down of violence in Sadr City since the Sadrits entered a truce deal nine days ago that would allow the Iraqi military to enter.
A five-member delegation from the Sadr movement arrived in Sadr City last week to follow-up on implementation of the agreement and said there was good cooperation between the Iraqi forces and the Sadr movement.
The latest military deployment in Sadr City came a day after the Iraqi military carried out search operations in the neighbouring Al-Shaab district and arrested five suspected members of the Mahdi Army.
The army and police cordoned off the entire area for several hours and searched several houses for weapons and ammunition.