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| Iraq |
| 26 killed in Iraqi bombings |
| 2006-02-03 |
| At least 27 Iraqis were killed, including 16 in a pair of Baghdad car bombings, while the US military said five of its troops lost their lives in attacks across the war-torn country. Sixteen Iraqis died and 90 were wounded in two separate car bombings in Baghdad's Al-Amin neighborhood -- one near a gas station and the other in a market -- an interior ministry official said. "Most of the casualties were from the blast in the market," the official said. The other car bomb blew up a parked gas tanker, setting off a huge fireball. The US military announced Thursday that five soldiers had died a day earlier in separate rebel attacks. Three soldiers were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad. The fourth succumbed to wounds suffered when his unit came under small-arms fire in the southwest of the capital. A marine also died of his wounds after coming under small-arms fire near the former rebel bastion town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. Four Iraqis were killed in heavy fighting reportedly between the Mehdi Army militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr and US forces in Baghdad's Sadr City, a US military spokesman said. He said fighting began when US-led forces came under attack during a nighttime raid in the poor, predominantly Shiite district. "The coalition forces conducted a raid in Sadr City to search for a known terrorist from (the Al-Qaeda-linked) Ansar al-Sunna group," the spokesman told AFP. He said a US helicopter came under fire from some men on a nearby rooftop. "Another helicopter of the coalition forces returned fire to eliminate the threat," he said, adding that "four individuals were killed." He did not say whether the four dead were members of the Mehdi Army. An interior ministry official said the fight was between US forces and Sadr's militia, and that a woman was also killed in the fighting. Sadr's militia and US troops have often clashed in the past, most dramatically in August 2004 when the fiery cleric waged a bloody rebellion in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in which hundreds of his men were killed. The interior ministry also reported that gunmen in a four-wheel drive vehicle of the kind used by foreign security details opened fire on a commuter minibus south of Baghdad, killing two and wounding seven. In a separate incident, insurgents attacked an oil storage facility near the northern city of Kirkuk setting off a massive blaze, an official with the Northern Oil Company said. In the restive city of Mosul, rebels killed three policemen and wounded 10 in separate attacks, police said, while gunmen assassinated the police intelligence officer responsible for an area south of Basra and his driver. The US military said two children died in the town of Hit during a gunfight between security forces and insurgents on Wednesday. In other violence, a high-ranking industry ministry official, Mary Hamza al-Rubai, was kidnapped on her way to work by gunmen who stopped her car but let her driver go. The US military said that 11 Syrians, suspected to be insurgents, were captured Thursday during an Iraqi army raid in the restive town of Ramadi. It said the raid against a suspected foreign rebel cell operating in Ramadi led to the capture of 15 suspected insurgents, four of them Iraqis and the rest from Syria. The raid targeted a factory in the Tameem district of Ramadi, the restive city located 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Baghdad. Iraqi and US authorities charge that foreign fighters, especially from Syria, infiltrate western Iraq to help the Sunni Arab-led insurgency across the war-torn country. Meanwhile, the interior ministry reported the discovery of 14 bodies, blindfolded and with their hands tied, found in a ditch at the edge of Sadr City. They had been shot in the head. Three policemen's bodies were found in Madaen, east of the capital, and two corpses were also found in Nabaie, north of Baghdad. They were all believed to be among an ill-fated expedition of police hopefuls from Samarra in mid-January. At least 60 young men had been returning from Baghdad after failing to be accepted by the police academy when their bus was stopped by insurgents and they were taken off into the desert. So far, police and medical sources have identified more than three dozen corpses from the group, mostly around Nabaie. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |