US offensive continues in Iraq

No serious US casualties have been reported in the Iron Fist offensive near the Syrian border by 1,000 Marines, soldiers and sailors against the al Qaida in Iraq group.

A US soldier died on Saturday of wounds suffered from indirect fire in Ramadi, a militant stronghold 70 miles west of Baghdad, the military said. The death raised to 1,936 the number of US military members who have died since the Iraq war began in 2003.

The US military also dismissed as “patently false” a claim yesterday by al-Qaida in Iraq that its insurgents had captured two US Marines in the fighting and would kill them unless all female Sunni detainees are released from US and Iraqi prisons in the country.

“That al Qaida resorts to lies and propaganda demonstrates that theirs is a losing cause,” the military said, adding that all its service members were accounted for.

In Ramadi insurgents using rocket-propelled grenades hit two Iraqi military vehicles, and seven militants were killed in the fighting that resulted, said Captain Jeffrey Pool, a US military spokesman.

Mortars also were shot at a US base in Ramadi, causing no casualties, and soldiers returned fire with artillery, Pool said.

Insurgents wearing black hoods were seen carrying machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in Ramadi’s streets, and Iraqi civilians gathered around the two burning Iraqi army pick-up trucks.

Some civilians celebrated the destruction by carrying around Iraqi military helmets and a military uniform taken from the wreckage.

In the northern city of Mosul, a drive-by-shooting killed Nafi’a Aziz, a female member of Ninevah’s provincial council, and her son, said police spokesman Brigadier Saeed Ahmed. Aziz was in charge of the council’s human rights committee and a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

In Kirkuk, another northern city, two Iraqi policemen were killed when their car was ambushed by suspected militants, and in the southern city of Hillah, the owner of a restaurant was killed by a roadside bomb, police said.

The offensive and street fighting occurred less than two weeks before a national referendum on a new constitution. Al-Qaida in Iraq and other groups in the Sunni-led insurgency have launched a wave of violence to wreck the October 15 vote, killing at least 207 people in the past eight days, including 16 US troops.

Today, coalition forces announced the arrest late last week of 12 Iraqis suspected of being involved in an illegal local committee that punishes violators of Islamic law in Sadr City, a section of Baghdad partially controlled by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Al-Sadr’s militia, the al-Mahdi Army, was a stubborn problem for American forces until a truce was negotiated about a year ago.

The US offensive in western Iraq began early on Saturday in the village of Sadah and has since spread to Karabila and Rumana, two nearby towns on the banks of the Euphrates River.

Today, witnesses said attacks by US helicopters in Rumana, and a roadside bomb explosion near an American armoured vehicle there, sent black smoke up into the air.

In Karabila, US forces were searching house to house for insurgents and meeting little or no resistance, witnesses said.

No casualties were reported in today’s fighting said the witnesses.

The US military says al-Qaida in Iraq, the country’s most feared insurgent group, has turned the area near Iraq’s border into a “sanctuary” and a way-station for foreign fighters entering from Syria.

Yesterday, Marines clashed in Karabila with insurgents who opened fire from a building in a firefight that killed eight militants, the military said.

Most of the militants appeared to have slipped out of Sadah before the force moved in, and hundreds of the village’s residents fled into Syria ahead of the assault.

There was “virtually no opposition” in Sadah, the Marine commander in western Anbar province, Colonel Stephen Davis, told The Associated Press.

At least 28 militants were killed in fighting yesterday, Davis said, bringing the two-day toll among insurgents to 36. There have been no serious US casualties in the operation, he said.

Today, a CNN journalist embedded with Marines in eastern Karabilah filed video showing the house-to-house fighting. About 20 Iraqi civilians fled, and the wounded included an Iraqi mother, father and their child, who were bleeding after being hit by pieces of concrete.

At one point, as Marine snipers fired from rooftops and US helicopters flew overhead, the Marines’ advance into eastern Karabilah was slowed for about an hour by sporadic gunfire from suspected militants, CNN reported.

In Baghdad, Iraqi Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum survived an apparent assassination attempt today when a roadside bomb blasted his seven-car convoy, killing three of his bodyguards, officials said.

The attack, which left Bahr al-Uloum with no injuries, occurred as he was travelling north for a ceremony to open a rebuilt oil refinery in the city of Beiji.

Iraq’s oil industry has the world’s third largest known reserves, but it has been crippled by war, sanctions and the insurgency. Oil production remains limited, curbed by decaying infrastructure and frequent attacks on pipelines and refineries by militants.

Also yesterday, political differences among Iraqi leaders deepened ahead of the crucial October 15 national vote on a new constitution.

Talabani, Iraq’s Kurdish president, urged Shiite Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari to step down over accusations he is monopolising power in the government and ignoring his Kurdish coalition partners’ demands, a spokesman for Talabani’s party said.

Elsewhere, Shiite militiamen released the recently kidnapped brother of Iraq’s interior minister, the freed man, Abdul-Jabbar Jabr, told Associated Press Television News.