"Deaths and injuries are soaring in Sadr City as US troops increase their military and economic pressure" on the Iraqi capital's huge Shiite slum district, the English-language website of Baghdad Azzaman daily reported on May 5.
Home to 2.5-million people, Sadr City is a stronghold of the political movement led by anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.
The Azzaman website reported that at least "532 people, among them women and children have been killed in the past two weeks, hospital sources in Sadr City said ...
"Most of the deaths and injuries, the sources added, have occurred due to random shelling by US warplanes and helicopter gun ships. US snipers are also responsible as many of the hits are in the head, chest and legs ... At least 14 percent of those killed and injured so far are children ...
"The troops have blocked all entries to the city for the third week and the sources said their supplies of medicine and other essential items were dangerously low ..."
Sadr City has been a target of unrelenting US military attacks since March 25, when Nuri al Maliki, Washington's puppet Iraqi prime minister, announced a crackdown on "criminal elements" in the southern Iraqi seaport of Basra.
The crackdown was widely seen in Iraq as aimed against the Sadrist movement, in advance of provincial elections in October in which they are expected to rout their US-backed governing Shiite political rivals — Maliki's Dawa party and Abdul Azziz al Hakim's much stronger Islamic Supreme council of Iraq (ISIC). The Sadrists oppose the privatisation of Iraq's oil industry, while the Dawa party and ISIC support it.
The May 1 Time magazine observed: "[B]arely a day into the offensive, Maliki had to call for backup as his troops ran into resistance from the militias. British and American warplanes bombed ground targets on behalf of the Iraqi troops and ferried in everything from medical supplies to bottles of water.
"In disarray, some Iraqi troops refused to fight or surrendered; some switched sides and joined the militias. According to the Iraqi government, 1300 soldiers deserted. As the offensive widened to include operations in Sadr's strongholds in Baghdad, it became clear that Iraqi forces could not press the campaign on their own."
The US military publicly claims that the assaults on Basra and Sadr City have not been aimed at the Mahdi Army as such, but at "criminals", allegedly armed and trained by the military forces of neighbouring Iran. US military officials have said the evidence of this includes caches of weapons found in Basra that have date stamps showing they were produced in Iran in 2007 and 2008.
However, asked on May 4 about claims that Shiite militias have been directly supplied with weapons by Iran, Maliki government spokesperson Ali al Dabbagh replied: "There is no conclusive evidence."
That same day, the US McClatchy Newspaper chain reported that the "US military said they were unsure when the more than month-long battle in Sadr City would end."