But your president said that war was over last May!
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64 killed in fierce Iraq clashes
BAQUBA: Insurgents attacked US troops and Iraqi security forces north of Baghdad, sparking fierce overnight battles that left at least 40 Iraqis dead and several soldiers wounded, a US military spokesman said on Saturday.
Early Saturday, US helicopters bombed some rebel positions on the outskirts of Kut, killing seven civilians and wounding six others, according to local doctors.
Further north, meanwhile, gunmen in the northern city of Kirkuk attacked Iraqi security forces, killing two and kidnapping three Kurdish officers, a commander of the Iraqi force said. The fighting in Baquba began with simultaneous rocket attacks late on Friday on an Iraqi police station, the governor’s office and a compound housing the US military’s civil affairs office, said Capt Issam Bornales, spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade. Five policemen, two assailants and a civilian were killed in two separate attacks in the main northern city of Mosul on Saturday, police said.
A US airman was killed and two others were injured in a mortar attack on Saturday at Balad Air Base, the US military said.
US forces offered on Saturday a ceasefire to fighters in Fallujah but they told an Iraqi negotiating team that they would agree to hold ceasefire talks only if marines withdrew from the city. “They want to see US forces pull out to something like five km outside the city,” Qahtan al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party said. Two more battalions, including Iraqi paramilitary forces, have been dispatched to help two US marine battalions fight insurgents in Fallujah, the US-led coalition’s deputy director of operations, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, said. Kimmitt said the marines had detained 60 insurgents, including five foreigners from Sudan, Egypt and Syria. An armed group said on Saturday it was holding 30 foreigners who would be brutally killed unless US-led coalition troops pulled out of Iraq, in a video aired by Al-Arabiya news channel. A US Abrams tank and a trailer truck were on fire after two separate attacks near Baghdad airport Saturday, a photographer on the scene said.
A convoy of US army oil tankers came under rocket-propelled grenade attack in Baghdad’s western suburb of Abu Ghraib, a witness said. “Several tankers are on fire,” Ammar Salim told a correspondent. Two US soldiers are missing following an attack by Iraqi insurgents on their convoy west of Baghdad on Friday, a coalition military spokesman said.
Two members of Germany’s crack GSG-9 security police team serving with their mission in Baghdad have gone missing and may be dead, German government officials confirmed on Saturday. The director of the Iraqi Red Crescent in the Kurdish city of Arbil and his wife have been found dead in the main northern city of Mosul, a Red Crescent official said.
Gunmen have killed an Iraqi interpreter working for the US-led coalition in a drive-by shooting in the central town of Hilla, Iraqi police said. A militia leader of Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr on Saturday declared a three-day truce for the Arbaeen religious commemoration in Karbala, as the US-led coalition warned thousands of pilgrims flocking there to be alert for terror attacks.
dailytimes.com.pk |
