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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, making an unannounced stop in Baghdad on Sunday, praised the Iraqi government's decision to take on Shiite militia members in Basra and in Baghdad and painted an upbeat picture of the Iraqi government's progress toward unifying the country. Ms. Rice, who visited the Iraqi capital on her way to a conference in Kuwait of Iraq's neighbors, said that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's government ''has made a choice to pursue militias and is willing to bear the consequences.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Heavy fighting broke out Tuesday in two of Iraq's largest cities, as Iraqi ground forces and helicopters mounted a huge operation to break the grip of the Shiite militias controlling Basra, and Iraqi forces clashed with militias in Baghdad. The fighting threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war. The battles, along with indications in recent weeks that militia and insurgent attacks had already been creeping up, raised fears across Iraq that Moktada al-Sadr, the renegade Shiite cleric, could pull out of a cease-fire he declared last summer. If his Mahdi Army militia does step up attacks, that could in turn slow American troop withdrawals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]