Five US marines killed in Iraq battle
Five US marines and at least ten Iraqis were killed in a battle with a large force of insurgents near the Syrian border today.
One of the dead Iraqis was the the city police chief, according to a hospital official.
The fighting at the town of Husaybah, on the Syrian border, appeared to be a new spillover of the intensified insurgent violence in the western towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.
It began when insurgents ambushed Marines in the city yesterday, sparking a 14-hour-battle with hundreds of gunmen. Fighting continued today in three neighbourhoods of the city, which was sealed off by US forces.
Five Marines were killed in the initial ambush and nine more were wounded throughout the fighting, an embedded journalist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Ten Iraqis were killed and 30 wounded – a mixture of insurgent fighters and civilian bystanders, said Hamid al-Alousi, a doctor at the hospital in the nearby city of Qaim, 240 miles west of Baghdad.
Some were shot by Marine snipers as they left their homes to use their outdoor toilets behind their houses, the doctor told the Arab television station Al-Arabiyah.
Husaybah police director Imad al-Mahlawi was one of those killed by American snipers, according to a man who identified himself as al-Mahlawi’s cousin, Adel Ezzeddin, Al-Arabiya reported.
According to Marine intelligence, nearly 300 Iraqi mujahedeen fighters from Fallujah and Ramadi launched the offensive in an outpost next to Husaybah, first setting off a roadside bomb to lure Marines out of their base and then firing 24 mortars as the Marines responded to the first attack, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch correspondent reported.
Marines have been battling Sunni insurgents in a siege of Fallujah, 35 miles west of the capital, and guerrilla activity has surged in nearby Ramadi, where 12 Marines were killed in an ambush on April 6.
