A United States offensive aimed at al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgents in western Iraq entered its third day on Monday, with air strikes in a town on the banks of the Euphrates River, witnesses said. At least 36 militants have died since the fighting began, officials said.
No serious US casualties have been reported in the ”Iron Fist” offensive by 1 000 marines, soldiers and sailors near the Syrian border.
The US military also dismissed as ”patently false” al-Qaeda in Iraq’s claim on Sunday that its insurgents had captured two US marines during the fighting and would kill them unless all female Sunni detainees were released from US and Iraqi prisons in the country.
”That al-Qaeda resorts to lies and propaganda demonstrates that theirs is a losing cause,” the military said on Monday, adding that all its service members are accounted for.
In Baghdad, Iraq’s oil minister narrowly survived an assassination attempt on Monday when a roadside bomb blasted his seven-car convoy, killing three of his escorts, officials said.
Elsewhere, roadside bombs and fighting between insurgents and Iraqi forces wounded at least seven Iraqis in Ramadi, a militant stronghold 115km west of the capital, police and hospital officials said.
Insurgents wearing black hoods were seen carrying machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in the city’s streets, and Iraqi civilians gathered around two burning Iraqi army pick-up trucks.
Some of the civilians celebrated the destruction by carrying Iraqi military helmets and a uniform that appeared to have been pulled from the burning Iraqi vehicles.
In the northern city of Mosul, a drive-by-shooting killed Nafi’a Aziz, a female member of Nineveh’s provincial council, and her son, said police spokesperson 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.
The offensive and street fighting were occurring less than two weeks before the national referendum on a new Iraqi Constitution.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other groups in the Sunni-led insurgency have launched a wave of violence to wreck the vote, killing at least 207 people over the past eight days.
On Monday, 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 Shi’ite cleric Moqtada 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.
On Monday, witnesses said helicopter attacks on Rumana were sending black smoke up into the air. No casualties were immediately reported in Monday’s fighting by the witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for their own safety, or by the US military command centre in Baghdad.
The US military says al-Qaeda 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.
In Karabilah, marines clashed with insurgents who opened fire from a building on Sunday 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, said the marine commander in western Anbar province, Colonel Stephen W. Davis.
At least 28 militants were killed in fighting on Sunday, Davis said, bringing the two-day toll among insurgents to 36. There have been no serious US casualties in the operation, he said.
On Monday, 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 flying 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.
Also on Sunday, political differences among Iraqi leaders deepened ahead of the crucial October 15 national vote on a new Constitution.
Talabani, Iraq’s Kurdish President, urged Shi’ite 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 spokesperson for Talabani’s party said.
Elsewhere, Shi’ite militiamen released the recently kidnapped brother of Iraq’s interior minister, the freed man, Abdul-Jabbar Jabr, told Associated Press Television News. — Sapa-AP