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U.S. troops press offensive in western Iraq

19 Jun 2005 07:29:06 GMT

Source: Reuters

By Peter Graff

KARABILA, Iraq, June 19 (Reuters) - U.S. troops, backed by Iraqi forces and U.S. and British aircraft, pushed into the northern section of a town near the Syrian border which they say has become a stronghold for foreign fighters.

Karabila, a near deserted town that was once home to 60,000 people, and other areas around the city of Qaim, are the focus of Operation Spear, one of two offensives launched in three days in the western desert against Sunni Arab rebels fighting the U.S. presence and new, Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad.

Along with Operation Dagger, closer to the capital near Tharthar lake, the high-profile assaults took place as U.S. President George W. Bush, absorbing new criticism of his strategy in Iraq, asked Americans to show patience on what he called a "central front in the war on terror".

U.S. aircraft and helicopters were in action overnight. The U.S. military said Britain's air force has also taken part.

A hundred or so people waving white flags walked out from northern areas of Karabila at dawn on Sunday after loudspeaker warnings that Marines were about to seize the district.

Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Mundy, whose men found what they called a car bomb factory, Iraqi hostages and a torture house for captives on Saturday, told reporters invited to witness the operation that he also expected to find at least six houses in northern Karabila that were bases for foreign militants.

A report by Marine spokesman Captain Jeff Pool said 10 civilians were wounded as a result of guerrillas firing from their homes. He said about 50 insurgents had been killed.

SUNNI ACCUSATION

A leading organisation for Iraq's Sunni Arab minority, once dominant under Saddam Hussein, accused U.S. forces of killing women and children and destroying homes, schools and other civilian buildings around Karabila and Qaim.

"Operation Spear...will break on the rock of Iraqi solidarity," the Muslim Clerics Association said in a statement, reflecting anger at U.S. military tactics.

The chief doctor at the area's main hospital in Qaim, Hamdi al-Alusi, said he had seen 10 bodies and treated 17 wounded. Most of those hurt were women and children, he said.

Iraq's al Qaeda group, led by Jordanian Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, said no insurgents had been killed in the strikes. "They are lying...their bombs fell on the Muslim public," the group said in a statement posted on an Islamist Web site.

U.S. commanders believe Zarqawi may be operating in the Euphrates River valley, cutting through the western desert from the Qaim area towards Baghdad. Although only a small component of the rebel forces, they say, foreigners appear to be responsible for some of the deadliest attacks such as suicide car bombings.

The U.S. military command blames Zarqawi for a surge in violence since the Shi'ite- and Kurdish-dominated government took office in April, since when more than 1,000 Iraqis and some 120 U.S. troops have been killed in rebel attacks.

The insurgents remain elusive, however. U.S. forces mounted a similar offensive, Operation Matador, near Qaim last month.

"It's like hunting birds," said Colonel Steve Davis of the U.S. Marines as he surveyed the ruins of what he said was an insurgent base in Karabila on Saturday. "You shoot a few, the rest fly away. You shoot a few again, the rest fly away again."

BUSH APPEAL

Bush said the U.S. overthrow of Saddam had been followed by Islamist guerrillas coming to Iraq to fight Americans.

"Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power," he said in a weekly radio address, after a poll showed 51 percent of voters now thought invading Iraq a bad idea. "But all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror."

At least 1,718 U.S. troops have been killed in 27 months in Iraq.

General William Webster, the U.S. commander for Baghdad, and Brigadier General Jaleel Khalaf, commander of the first Iraqi army brigade given charge of its own section of the city, said a month-long sweep known as Operation Lightning had succeeded in halving the number of car bombings in the capital.

About 1,200 suspects, of whom about 50 were foreigners, had been detained, they told a news conference on Saturday.

However, Webster said the operation would go on, as insurgents remained capable of mounting deadly assaults.

"Certainly saying anything about 'breaking the back' or 'about to reach the end of the line' or those kinds of things do not apply to the insurgency at this point," Webster said.

Near Tikrit, Saddam's home town north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed three Iraqi soldiers and wounded nine on Sunday when he drove his car at an army patrol, police said.

(Additional reporting by Majid Hameed in Qaim and Walid Ibrahim, Luke Baker and Alastair Macdonald in Baghdad)

Firefighters examine a destroyed house in Wagna, in Austria's southeastern province of Styria, June 18, 2005. Two children in the age of four and five years were killed when an explosion hit a restaurant on Friday night in the small village of Wagna, Austrian police said on Saturday. The cause of the explosion has not yet been confirmed. REUTERS/Stringer

Explosion Kills 2 Children in Austria

VIENNA, Austria Jun 19, 2005 — An explosion ripped through a pizzeria in a town in the southeastern province of Styria, killing two children and injuring seven, in a blast that may have been the result of an attack, authorities said.

The explosion Saturday touched off a fire and gutted the building in Wagna bei Leibnitz, a small town in Austria's wine-growing region, Austria Press Agency reported. Several surrounding buildings were damaged.

The two dead children were between ages 4 and 5. The injured, including an 18-month old child, were hospitalized.

Police combed the collapsed structure hours after the 2:40 a.m. blast in hopes of determining the cause, though by mid-afternoon authorities discounted the possibility that leaking gas was to blame. "It looks at the moment like it was probably an attack," Fire inspector Guenter Peterka told state television.

The Egyptian family that operated the restaurant had been involved in a dispute with others in the building over the noise from the restaurant.

Iraq Restaurant Blast Kills 23, Hurts 36

By FRANK GRIFFITHS - Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq A suicide bombing ripped through a popular Baghdad kebab restaurant at lunchtime, killing at least 23 people and wounding 36 Sunday as insurgents stepped up attacks nationwide, defying two major U.S.-led offensives aimed at routing foreign fighters.

The U.S. military also announced that a Marine died Saturday during Operation Spear _ the first American death reported in the twin offensives.

The bomber detonated a vest laden with explosives at about 2:45 p.m. in the Ibn Zanbour restaurant, just 400 yards from the main gate of the heavily fortified Green Zone and is especially popular with Iraqi police and soldiers.

The explosion killed seven police officers, while the injured included 16 police officers and the bodyguards of Iraqi Finance minister Ali Abdel-Amir Allawi, police Lt. Col. Talal Jumaa said. The minister was not in the restaurant.

Elsewhere, militants staged attacks that killed at least nine people, despite two joint U.S.-Iraqi offensives _ operations Spear and Dagger _ that began earlier this week with about 1,000 U.S. forces and Iraqi soldiers each.

Insurgents also exploded a water pipeline in the capital, and Mayor Alaa al-Timimi said the city of 5 million people would suffer a 24-hour water shortage.

Nearly 60 insurgents have been killed and 100 captured so far in the offensives, which are aimed at destroying militant networks near the Syrian border and north of Baghdad, the military said. Three Americans have been wounded.

The Marine who was killed Saturday by small-arms fire during Operation Spear had been assigned to Regimental Combat Team 2 of the 2nd Marine Division. At least 1,720 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Troops participating in Operation Spear _ in its third day in the Anbar province town of Karabilah _ fired Hellfire missiles overnight at two homes where insurgents holed up after shooting mortars at coalition forces, said Lt. Col. Tim Mundy, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment. The military said they believed four or five militants may have been killed in the counterattack.

A battle tank killed a suspected suicide truck bomber, Marine Capt. Jeffrey Pool said from Ramadi, the provincial capital. The vehicle exploded, and the tank crew observed secondary blasts from explosives rigged to it.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have been shouting through loudspeakers to residents of the western town to leave their homes with white flags and head to a safer area. But most homes already are empty, said Marine Capt. Christopher Goland of Lima Company, a unit of the 3rd Battalion.

Dozens of buildings in Karabilah, 200 miles west of Baghdad, were destroyed after airstrikes and tank shelling, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.

Intelligence officials believe Anbar province is a portal used by extremist groups, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist group, to smuggle in foreign fighters. Syria is under intense pressure from Washington and Baghdad to tighten control of its porous 380-mile border with Iraq.

The majority of the region's residents are Sunni Arabs, who are believed to make up the core of an insurgency that has killed at least 1,131 people since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's Shiite-led government was announced April 28.

On Saturday, troops searching the town found four Iraqi hostages beaten, handcuffed and chained to a wall in a torture center, the military said. Some of the men were believed to be Iraqi border guards who had been held for three weeks.

Troops searching the bunker found nooses, electrical wire and a bathtub filled with water for electric shocks and mock drownings.

In the basement, troops found automatic rifles, ammunition, terrorist training manuals and DVDs showing insurgents beheading captives, Pool said.

U.S. and Iraqi forces also found a bomb-making factory with blasting caps, cell phones and other materials. They uncovered sniper rifles, ammunition and a mortar system. A nearby schoolhouse believed to be used for training terrorists had instructions for making roadside bombs written on a chalkboard.

The second offensive, Operation Dagger, was launched Saturday, targeting the marshy shores of a lake north of Baghdad. Dagger seeks to eliminate insurgent training camps and weapons caches in the Lake Tharthar area, 50 miles northwest of Baghdad.

Both operations come on the heels of two other major offensives in the same areas that killed about 125 militants earlier this month and in March. Iraqi troops did not participate in earlier offensives in the area.

In other violence, a suicide car bomber killed two Iraqi soldiers and two civilian employees as construction workers were fixing the gate at a security checkpoint in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown 80 miles north of Baghdad, Army Capt. Muhanad Ahmed said. Eight soldiers and four civilians were wounded in the attack.

A bomb in a car parked near the Shiite al-Nawab mosque also exploded in the northern Baghdad suburb of Kazimiyah, killing one civilian and wounding 27 people, police Maj. Falah al-Muhammadawi said.

Gunmen killed two Iraqi policemen in western Baghdad as they headed to work, while a second band of gunmen killed an electrical engineer going to work at an oil refinery in the capital.

In the northern city of Mosul, two mortar rounds missed the governor's building and landed at a butcher's market, killing a 12-year-old boy and wounding 14 people, hospital officials said.

Also Sunday:

_Saddam Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as "Chemical Ali," was one of eight former regime officials to be shown on a tape released by the Iraqi Special tribunal. The suspects were testifying before an investigating magistrate and signing statements. It was the third such tape released by the tribunal this month.

_The Iraqi government announced it had arrested a suspected member of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq, a man it claimed was responsible for building car bombs and carrying out more than 60 bombings around the capital. Musaab Kasser Abdul Rahman Hassan, known as Abu Younis, was arrested on May 26 during an operation in Baghdad, the government said in a statement.

_The U.S. military said American and Iraqi soldiers had captured six suspected insurgents in raids the day before around central and southern Baghdad _ including someone it described as "a specifically identified terror cell financier."