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U.S. and Iraqi forces killed some 300 gunmen from an apocalyptic Muslim cult in a day-long battle involving U.S. tanks and aircraft near the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, Iraqi police, army and political sources said. The U.S. military said on Monday it was an ongoing operation so it could not provide any details. An Iraqi army source said U.S. forces took control of the operation on Sunday and had continued bombing the area until well after dawn on Monday. Two Americans were killed, the U.S. military said on Sunday, when an attack helicopter went down during the battle that...

NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - The leader of an Iraqi cult who claimed to be the Mahdi, a messiah-like figure in Islam, was killed in a battle on Sunday near Najaf with hundreds of his followers, Iraq's national security minister said on Monday. Women and children who joined 600-700 of his "Soldiers of Heaven" on the outskirts of the Shi'ite holy city may be among the casualties, Shirwan al-Waeli told Reuters. All those people not killed were in detention, many of them wounded. Authorities were on alert on Monday as hundreds of thousands of Shi'ite Muslims massed in the area to...

An intelligence source provides preliminary information on the players behind the Najaf battle; al-Qaeda's Omar Brigade appears to have player a role The motivation and prime actors behind the fighting in Najaf remains uncertain one day after the battle ended. As U.S. and Iraq intelligence attempts to sort out the details, media reports indicate a mix of Shi'ite and Sunni fighters were involved in the battle against Iraqi forces, which resulted in upwards of 300 enemy killed in 24 hours of combat. As we noted earlier this morning, it appears both a Shi'ite 'end-times cult' and al_Qaeda in Iraq's Omar...

BAGHDAD, Jan 30 (Reuters) - A Shi'ite Muslim messianic cult, whose leader was reported to have been involved in fighting with U.S. and Iraqi troops, said on Tuesday it played no part in the battle in which about 260 people were killed. Followers of Imam Ahmed al-Hassan al-Yamani, who styles himself the messenger or envoy of the Mahdi, a messiah-like figure in Islam, said theirs was a peaceful movement not linked to the "Soldiers of Heaven" who fought the day-long battle near the holy city of Najaf on Sunday. Conflicting accounts from Iraqi political and security sources have thickened the...

More details have emerged about the shadowy cult whose followers fought Iraqi and US forces in a day-long battle in southern Iraq on Sunday. Iraqi officials say 200 members of the group - which calls itself the Soldiers of Heaven - were killed in fierce fighting near the Shia holy city of Najaf. A well-armed group, a charismatic leader and an audacious plot to attack a holy city and kill its religious leaders. If a novelist had invented the story of the Soldiers of Heaven, it might have been dismissed as a dark fantasy. But an account of the bizarre...

Iraq's army announced Monday it killed the leader of a heavily armed cult of messianic Shiites called "the Soldiers of Heaven" in a fierce gunbattle aimed at foiling a plot to attack leading Shiite clerics and pilgrims in the southern city of Najaf on the holiest day of the Shiite calendar Senior Iraqi security officers said that as part of the plot, three gunmen were captured in Najaf after renting a hotel room in front of the office of Iraq's most senior Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, with plans to attack it. The fierce 24-hour battle was ultimately...