6 American soldiers are killed in Iraq attacks

[wilheim]

By Christopher Torchia, Associated Press, 3/15/2004

BAGHDAD -- Roadside bombs killed four American soldiers in Baghdad, raising to six the number of US troops who died in attacks in Iraq over the weekend, the coalition said yesterday.

Hundreds of Iraqis, meanwhile, mourned a Shi'ite politician's relative who died in a bomb blast in his shop Saturday.

A roadside bomb killed three soldiers from the First Armored Division and wounded another during a patrol Saturday night in southeastern Baghdad, a spokeswoman for the US-led coalition said.

That followed a similar attack in Tikrit, the hometown of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, that killed two American soldiers and wounded three others.

US forces responded by making several arrests and dispatching troops into the streets in a show of force Saturday, the same day that the First Infantry Division's First Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, took control of the restive Sunni Triangle town in a troop rotation.

Soldiers who have been on the front line facing the anti-US insurgency -- believed to be led by Hussein loyalists and Islamic militants -- have been carrying out joint patrols with the newcomers. Saturday was only the second day that troops from the Germany-based 18th Regiment patrolled alone.

A sixth soldier died at a combat hospital from injuries suffered in a blast in the Iraqi capital yesterday morning, the spokeswoman said.

"We were woken up this morning by the blast. We saw an American military truck on fire," resident Saad Mohsen said. A second explosion set a nearby civilian truck on fire, he said.

In Washington yesterday, US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell defended the decision to go to war with Iraq, saying intelligence before the US-led invasion was not "cooked" even though inspectors have not found banned weapons.

"We may not find the stockpiles. They may not exist any longer, but let's not suggest that we knew this," Powell said on ABC's "This Week."

"We went to the United Nations, we went to the world, with the best information we had. Nothing that was cooked," he said.

Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the March 20 invasion that ousted Hussein, Powell and other Bush administration officials appeared on talk shows yesterday to defend the war and call attention to advances in rebuilding the country.

In Baghdad, about 1,000 mourners attended the funeral yesterday of Haidar al-Qazwini, the brother-in-law of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shi'ite member of the Iraqi Governing Council.

US and Iraqi security officials suspect militants are trying to trigger conflict between Sunnis, who dominated Hussein's government, and the resurgent Shi'ite majority. Iraqi police said Qazwini died after an unidentified man entered a shop and left a bag containing explosives, which later detonated.

Roadside bombs have become the main threat to US soldiers on patrol in the Sunni Triangle, a region north and west of Baghdad that has seen some of the fiercest guerrilla attacks.

The latest deaths brought to 564 the number of US service members who have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq. Of those, 385 died as a result of hostile action, and 179 died of other causes.

 

[wilheim]

BAGHDAD — After a period of weeks in which the number of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq had been decreasing, a spate of bombings over the last five days has killed nine troops, including a National Guard soldier who had just arrived in the country.

It was too early to tell if the attacks since Wednesday signaled a trend. In recent months, the pace of American combat fatalities has diminished — although there have been several massive bombings directed against Iraqi police and Shiite pilgrims.

According to Pentagon reports, 47 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq in January, slightly more than the 40 recorded in December but far less than the 82 recorded in November. The figure fell to 20 deaths in February.

In the first 14 days of March, however, 15 U.S. service personnel were killed, as well as two American civilians working for the U.S.-led occupation authority who were reportedly chased in their car near Karbala and killed by a group that allegedly included Iraqi policemen.

The chief military spokesman here, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, said it was "too early to divine a pattern yet."

"I think it is more of a cluster than it is a pattern," he said of the recent number of deaths.

He also said it would be wrong to ascribe the casualties to the arrival of fresh, less-tested troops, noting that most of the nine killed since Wednesday were in units long based in Iraq. The U.S. military is in the midst of a massive troop rotation that will continue through May.

Kimmitt said the military had been hesitant to declare the decrease in the number of casualties since November a sign of progress, recognizing that it might be reversed. Attacks on U.S. troops have been holding steady at between 18 and 22 per day for the last few months, he said.

In the worst of the recent attacks, a bomb exploded Saturday night in southeastern Baghdad, killing three Americans and wounding one. That was followed by a blast Sunday morning that killed the newly arrived National Guard soldier.

In addition, two 1st Infantry Division soldiers were killed and three were wounded Saturday in Tikrit. A roadside explosive detonated, and attackers followed with a fusillade of gunfire on the division's three-vehicle convoy. The 1st Infantry has recently taken over control of north-central Iraq from the 4th Infantry Division.

Three U.S. soldiers died in bomb attacks north and west of Baghdad on Wednesday and Thursday.

The identities of those killed Saturday and Sunday have not been released, pending notification of relatives. But the Pentagon has identified those killed in the earlier actions.

Staff Sgt. Joe L. Dunigan Jr., 37, of Belton, Texas, and Spc. Christopher K. Hill, 26, of Ventura died Thursday when their vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device near Fallouja, the mainly Sunni Muslim town west of Baghdad that has been a hotspot of guerrilla activity.

Pfc. Bert. E. Hoyer, 23, of Ellsworth, Wis., was killed Wednesday when a bomb hit a convoy in Baqubah, north of the capital.

In Washington on Sunday, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld stood by prewar assertions that Iraq posed an "imminent threat" to the United States despite recent assertions by the Bush administration's CIA director and its top Iraq weapons tracker that no weapons of mass destruction appear to have existed at that time.

"We all believed that it is an urgent threat, and I believe to this day that it was an urgent threat," Rice said of Iraq on NBC's "Meet the Press" television program. "And we are safer as a result, because today Iraq is no longer going to be a state of weapons-of-mass-destruction concern."

Rumsfeld at first reiterated his claim that neither he nor President Bush called Iraq an imminent threat.

But he elaborated after being confronted with his Sept. 19, 2002, statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, when he said, "There are a number of terrorist states pursuing weapons of mass destruction, but no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq."

Rumsfeld said he believed that illicit weapons might still be found. "It's a country the size of California," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "He could have hidden … enough biological weapons in the hole that we found Saddam Hussein in to kill tens of thousands of people. So it's not as though we have certainty today."