By DPA
Baghdad : At least 16 people were killed and 14 wounded when US forces conducted a pre-dawn air raid south of Tikrit, police sources said Tuesday.
An air strike hit a house, 20 km south of the city, killing seven men, six women and three children, senior police officer Jassem Mohammed of the Salahaddin police department told DPA.
The wounded were transferred to Tikrit Teaching Hospital.
There was no immediate comment from the US military on the incident.
In other developments, joint Iraqi-US forces arrested 21 suspected gunmen, including nine wanted militants, in a raid across the villages of Taza, south-west of Kirkuk, in the early hours of Tuesday, a police source told the Voices of Iraq news agency.
Police sources in Diwaniyah also told the agency that joint Iraqi-US forces had a day earlier arrested eight Iraqis, relatives and aides of Sadr leaders in the village of Aal Marsoul, around 35 km south of Diwaniyah.
The reason why this group was specifically captured is not clear.
However, recently the joint forces have been clamping down on several leaders of the group loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, in addition to targeting members of the so-called Mahdi Army, the group’s paramilitary wing.
Only on Monday, the US army had detained four Mahdi Army militants also south of Diwaniyah city.
In the same area, witnesses had also reported that members of a group calling itself The Brigades of Hussein have been circulating leaflets urging the inhabitants of Omm al-Kheil district to evacuate their homes “for their own safety.”