About 70 insurgents were killed in United States air strikes in the Ramadi region of western Iraq, where five US and two Iraqi soldiers were killed in a weekend roadside bombing, the US military said on Monday.
Fifty rebels were killed on Sunday in raids by helicopters and fighter jets on a suspected safe house in the Abu Faraj region north of Ramadi where suspects were loading vehicles with weapons, the military said in a statement.
Another 20 were killed just east of the town when a fighter jet fired a precision-guided bomb as rebels were in the process of planting a roadside bomb, it said.
A bomb planted at the same spot killed five US soldiers on Saturday, as Iraq was voting on a draft Constitution that lays out the legal and democratic road map for the country after years of dictatorship under Saddam Hussein.
US-led ground forces, backed up by a war plane, also battled rebels who attacked a government building in Ramadi with small arms fire, killing between one and three insurgents.
”Coalition forces continue to aggressively pursue terrorists whose aim is to kill Iraqi civilians and coalition forces in anb attempt to disrupt the political process,” the US statement said.
There were no reports of coalition or civilian casualties. — AFP
