US and Iraqi forces killed 14 gunmen in battles in eastern Baghdad overnight, the US military said today as several weeks of fighting with Shi'ite militiamen showed no sign of easing.
Hospital officials said they had received 14 bodies and treated 25 wounded following clashes in the eastern Baghdad stronghold of anti-American Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, but it was not immediately clear if they were gunmen or civilians.
Two rockets landed near the al-Sadr hospital in the densely populated slum on Saturday, wounding 20 people, including women and children, and damaging a number of ambulances, a senior official at the hospital said.
It was unclear who fired the rockets.
The US military has been carrying out air strikes on gunmen nearly every day in the militia bastion since fighting erupted more than a month ago, but says every effort is made to ensure civilians are not in harms way.
It says militants have fired more than 700 rockets and mortars at various targets during that period, mostly at the Green Zone government and diplomatic compound. Many have been fired from within Sadr City.
The US military blames rogue elements of Sadr's Mehdi Army militia for the rocket fire. It accuses Iran of arming, funding and training those militants, a charge Tehran denies.
An Iraqi delegation was expected to return from Tehran today after showing officials there evidence of Iranian support for Shi'ite militias.
The Iraqi government has until now been restrained in its criticism of its Shi'ite neighbour, but has been upset by the recent discovery of large amounts of Iranian-made weapons.
The US military said this week "very, very significant" amounts of Iranian weaponry had been found in the southern city of Basra and also Baghdad during an offensive against militiamen in those cities that began in late March. Some of those arms were made in 2008, the military says.