BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Insurgents attacked a police station Wednesday for the second day in a row, but U.S. and Iraqi forces captured 50 of them after a two-hour gunbattle.\nAbout 60 gunmen attacked the police station in Madain, south of Baghdad, with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles, said police Lt. Col. Falah al-Mohammadawi. U.S. troops and a special Iraqi police unit responded, catching the insurgents in crossfire, he said.\nFour police officers were killed, including the commander of the special unit, and five were wounded, al-Mohammadawi said. None of the attackers died, and among the captives was a Syrian.\nOn Tuesday, about 100 masked gunmen stormed a jail in Muqdadiyah near the Iranian border and freed more than 30 prisoners, most of them fellow insurgents.\nAlso Wednesday, insurgents fired a mortar round at a government installation in the northern town of Beiji during a visit by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, an aide said. Chalabi, a Shiite Muslim, was not harmed and later returned to Baghdad, the aide said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.\nGunmen in the capital targeted Shiite Muslims returning from a religious commemoration in the holy city of Karbala, killing six pilgrims and wounding 50 others traveling in minivans and the back of trucks, police said.\nEarlier, gunmen killed three civilians transporting bricks on a road outside the city of Baqouba northeast of the capital. A roadside bomb then exploded when a police patrol responded, wounding an officer, police said.\nPolice continued to find corpses in the shadowy war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Three bodies, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture, were found in a western Baghdad neighborhood just after midnight, and the body of a young man shot in the chest was discovered in Musayyib, about 40 miles south of the capital, police said.\nThe body of a man in an Iraqi military uniform who had been killed outside Madain was also taken to a morgue in the southern city of Kut, an official said.\nBack in the capital, roadside bombs targeting police patrols wounded at least six officers -- including four who work as guards at the Education Ministry -- and two other policemen and a passerby were wounded in a drive-by shooting, police said.\nIn Tuesday's attack in Muqdadiyah, about 100 gunmen cut phone wires and fired RPGs in a daring operation that freed 18 fellow insurgents who had been captured in raids Sunday.\nPolice said 15 other captives were sprung in the assault, which killed 30 people, including 20 Iraqi security forces.\nIn an Internet posting Tuesday night, the military wing of the Mujaheddin Shura Council, a Sunni Muslim insurgent group, purportedly claimed it carried out the operation. The Web posting said the group killed 40 policemen, freed 33 prisoners and captured weapons. The claim could not be independently verified.\nBoth U.S. and Iraqi military officials had said last year that the area was no longer an insurgent stronghold, but Tuesday's attack showed the militants still could assemble a large force, capable of operating in the region virtually at will.
The insurgency's strength, spiraling sectarian violence and the continuing stalemate over forming a government in Iraq have led politicians and foreign policy experts to say Iraq was on the brink or perhaps in the midst of civil war.\nAn increasing number of Americans are calling for a pullout of U.S. forces regardless of the consequences for Iraq, but most mainstream Iraqi politicians do not want the troops to leave until the insurgency is defeated. Some radical leaders, like firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, demand an immediate pullout.
