Twenty Iraqis were killed and six wounded in a United States air strike overnight on suspected Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi safe houses in Fallujah, medical officials and the US military said on Thursday.
Two buildings were destroyed when a US fighter jet fired a pair of missiles or a large bomb at about 11.45pm local time in the residential neighbourhood of Jebel in Fallujah, a hotspot of radical Sunni insurgency 50km west of Baghdad, police and medical officials said.
”We now have 17 dead people and six wounded,” Dr Seifeddin Taha of the Fallujah general hospital said late on Wednesday.
Another three bodies were pulled from the rubble on Thursday as bulldozers cleared wreckage and a crowd of rescue workers dug through the debris and searched for body parts and bits of flesh, said rescue worker Hossam Ibrahim.
”All the wounded are families. Among the dead, there could be two or three children but the bodies are torn to pieces and it’s difficult to tell,” Taha said.
Two giant craters gouged the ground, leaving one house completely destroyed and the second badly damaged. The blast knocked down a few palm trees and smashed-up furniture and televisions could be seen in the wreckage.
The US military confirmed the attack, describing it as a ”precision” strike on ”safe houses and meeting locations” for associates of the Jordanian-born Zarqawi, whom US officials blame for dozens of car bomb attacks in Iraq and who has a $25-million bounty on his head.
Earlier in the day, Zarqawi supporters were observed removing a corpse from a car trunk and burying the body in southern Fallujah, the military said.
The military had no immediate casualty figures from the attack.
Five people were killed and 42 wounded on Saturday when US marines pounded suspected extremist positions in the restive city, a bastion for the country’s most violent groups that the US military and Iraqi forces have failed to rein in.
The US military has regularly bombed suspected Zarqawi safe houses in Fallujah since June.
In April, Fallujah was the scene of bitter fighting, leaving hundreds dead as US marines and insurgents clashed in the streets.
US forces besieged the city after four American civilian security contractors were killed in Fallujah and two of the bodies mutilated. — Sapa-AFP