Top Mookie Aide Whacked

What's this ceasefire business they speak of? The only shame of this is it wasn't Al-Sadr himself.

Iraqi police imposed a curfew to prevent an outbreak of violence in the southern Shi'ite holy city of Najaf on Friday, after a senior aide to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr was shot dead.

A missile ripped a hole in the second floor of the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad, killing three civilians outside the hotel, police said.

The hotel, sited across the Tigris River from the Green Zone diplomatic and government compound, houses some international media but is largely vacant. The Associated Press, which has TV staff in the hotel, said none of its people were hurt.

Overnight, U.S. aircraft killed 12 people in strongholds of Sadr's masked Mehdi Army militia.

In Najaf, police set up road blocks and drove through the city with loudspeakers ordering shops closed and people off the streets, a Reuters reporter said, after Riyadh al-Nuri, a top Sadr aide whose sister is married to the cleric's brother, was gunned down.

"We have lost a beloved friend and brother to our hearts. The occupation had its hand in this crime in some way," aide Abdul-Hadi al-Mohammedawi quoted Sadr as saying in a speech at the cemetery where Nuri was buried. "His eminence (Sadr) calls for calm and not to drift into strife."

U.S. and Iraqi forces have clashed repeatedly with Sadr's Mehdi Army since March, when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki launched a crackdown on the militia in the southern city of Basra.

Basra has been relatively quiet since Sadr called his fighters off the streets of Iraq's second largest city nearly two weeks ago.

In the early morning hours of Friday, however, Iraqi troops were fired upon when they tried to enter the northern Basra district of Hayaniya, a Mehdi Army stronghold, police said.

We'd have saved a lot of headaches had Al-Sadr went bye-bye years ago. Now, however, he and his goons are still defiant.

But in a Mehdi Army statement read over loudspeakers in Sadr City mosques on Thursday night, the militia was defiant.

"They want us to disarm, but they are seeking to take away the dignity and honour of the Iraqi people," it said, according to a Reuters reporter who heard the statement.

"They want to turn Iraq into another Palestine, but we say to the tyrants that we will not abandon our weapons. Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest)."