Yanked from sleep by machine gun fire

The explosion of gunshots shook my bedroom window, yanking me out of sleep in an instant on my third night back in Baghdad.
Iraqi police had come under fire from a building near my hotel and were responding. An army unit also stepped in, adding extra rounds of heavy machine gun fire.
After three weeks out of the country, the gunfight in the early hours of Tuesday morning was a harsh reminder that although violence in Iraq on the whole is down there are still plenty of dangers.
Sitting up in bed trying to work out what was happening, I sent a text message to a fellow journalist friend who was sleeping a few floors below me in the same hotel.
“What the f*** is going on outside?” I asked.
She replied: “No clue. Just keep away from the windows.” Followed by: “Don’t they know there are people trying to sleep around here!?”

After a few moments the gunshots closest by stopped so I ventured out on to the balcony to find out if there was anything of interest to see.
The streets, however, were dark and calm, revealing nothing about what had sounded like a vicious gunfight, so I went back to bed.
Daybreak failed to shed much more light on the night’s drama, with people saying that an Iraqi soldier may have been shot in the clashes although it was unclear whether he had been killed.
Violence has dropped drastically in Baghdad since the summer, when an additional rotation of 30,000 American troops reached its peak. But a spate of attacks over the past few days demonstrates the fragility of the gains, prompting some Iraqis to fret whether the security situation will deteriorate again.
A suicide car bomber detonated his explosives at a checkpoint protecting the compounds of Iraq's former prime minister and a Sunni lawmaker on Tuesday, killing two guards in a neighbourhood bordering the fortified Green Zone.
The previous day, a suicide car bomb killed one US soldier and wounded two north of the capital, while drive-by gunmen on motorcycles fatally shot the head of Iraq's largest psychiatric hospital as he was returning home from work.

[Picture: View of Baghdad from helicopter]