Five U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq Attack
By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD - Insurgents struck a U.S. military base north of Baghdad with rockets at dawn Saturday, killing five American soldiers, an official said, while a rocket crashed into a crowded market in the Iraqi capital, killing at least three people.
Besides the deaths in the market, up to 12 Iraqis were killed Saturday in several attacks, including an apparent suicide car bombing in Tikrit, fighting in Baghdad's Sadr City, and clashes between Polish troops and Shiite militiamen in Karbala.
The fighting in Sadr City, an eastern mostly Shiite district in the capital, came when U.S. forces launched raids against suspected militiamen, sparking a battle that the military said killed one or two Iraqis. During the fighting, three Iraqi girls were badly burned when a shell exploded in their bedroom where they slept.
Hours later, a rocket slammed into the neighborhood's crowded Chicken Market, killing at least three people and wounding dozens, residents said. Human flesh could be seen among scattered market goods and burned-out cars in the chaotic street. It was unclear who fired the rocket or what its intended target was.
The five U.S. solders were killed around dawn, when two 57-mm rockets slammed into the base in Taji, Air Force Lt. Col. Sam Hudspath said. Taji is a former Iraqi air force base 12 miles north of Baghdad that is now used by the Army's Texas-based 1st Cavalry Division.
Six soldiers were wounded in the attack.
Elsewhere, a Marine died from combat injuries suffered on April 14 while fighting guerrillas in Iraq (news - web sites)'s western Anbar province, the military announced. The Marines have been besieging the Anbar city of Fallujah since the beginning of the month, but the military has refused to specify whether Marine casualties from Anbar are from that campaign.
The deaths of the five soldiers in Baghdad and the Marine brought to 107 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the beginning of April. Since March 2003, 715 servicemembers have died in this country.
The Pentagon (news - web sites) announced Friday that 595 U.S. soldiers have been wounded in the past two weeks, raising the total number of troops wounded in combat to 3,864 since the start of the conflict.
Also Friday, the U.N.'s top envoy for Iraq said the 25 members of Iraq's U.S.-picked Governing Council should be excluded from a planned caretaker government that is supposed to take nominal sovereignty from the U.S.-led occupation on June 30.
While a group of "technocrats" runs the interim government, the council members should spend the next nine months campaigning for elections due by the end of January, said the envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi.
Washington has thrown its backing behind Brahimi's proposal, suggesting the United States is prepared to allow the removal of Iraqis it had put forward to run the country.
In other violence Saturday:
_ An Iraqi woman working as a translator for the U.S. military was shot and killed along with her husband as they drove to a U.S. base, a hospital official said.
_ A car bomb, apparently set off by a suicide attacker, exploded near a U.S. base on a downtown street in the northern city of Tikrit, hometown of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and a center for anti-U.S. resistance.
Three bodies were seen in the blackened wreckage of a car. Witnesses said they believed the blast targeted a convoy of Iraqi officials heading to the mayor's office in the city. The top U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, visited Tikrit a day earlier for meetings with tribal leaders.
_ Polish troops clashed overnight with Shiite militiamen in the city of Karbala, killing five, a spokesman for the multinational peacekeeping force in south-central Iraq said Saturday. A day earlier, followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr attacked Bulgarian troops in the city, killing one soldier.
In the Sadr City fighting, Maj. Phil Smith of the Army's 1st Cavalry said troops raided the neighborhood early Saturday, attempting to apprehend suspected insurgents. Soldiers did not capture their targets, but became locked in a firefight with neighborhood residents, Smith said.
U.S. troops believe one or two Iraqis were killed, he said. No American soldiers were hurt, Smith said.
An Associated Press photographer at the scene visited a home in the neighborhood where a shell crashed through the outer wall and detonated in a bedroom, injuring three girls aged 9, 13 and 18.
On Friday, U.S. commanders repeated blunt warnings that the Marine assault on Fallujah could resume, meaning a revival of heavy fighting that has killed hundreds of Iraqis in the city. Marines say guerrillas in the city have not been sincerely abiding by a call to surrender heavy weapons in their arsenals.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt suggested Marines could storm the city within days.
"Our patience is not eternal. ... We're talking days," Kimmitt said.
Meanwhile, Brahimi, who is helping select an interim Iraqi government, said the Governing Council should be dissolved as planned on June 30.
Council members "who have political parties and are leaders of their parties should get ready to win the election .... and stay out of the interim government," Brahimi said Friday on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos."
During the seven months between June 30 and elections, Iraq should be run by a government of "technocrats" representative of Iraq's ethnic diversity, Brahimi has said.
Also Friday, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said the war in Iraq is going "reasonably well" but acknowledged the United States faces long involvement there. Gen. Richard Myers said fighting terrorism is a long-term commitment and said, "Decades is probably not unreasonable."
The top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Army Gen. John Abizaid, suggested in an interview with The New York Times in Qatar on Friday that he was likely to ask for another extension in the current troop levels in Iraq, now at 135,000, and might even ask for more troops beyond that. |
