IRAQ:As US forces launched a big offensive in Iraq with an airborne assault targeting al-Qaeda guerrillas yesterday, suicide bombers killed 175 people and wounded 200 in Mosul, one of the worst single incidents in the four-year-old war.
The suicide bombers targeted Yazidi members, an ancient minority sect, in separate neighbourhoods in the town of Kahtaniya, west of Mosul, by detonating three fuel tankers. Yazidis are members of a pre-Islamic Kurdish sect and live in northern Iraq and Syria. They say they have often faced discrimination in Iraq - In April gunmen shot dead 23 factory workers from the sect in Mosul.
As part of their major new countrywide push, US forces raided Baghdad's Shia slum of Sadr City yesterday targeting militants they said were linked to Iran. Relatives said a five- year-old girl and her father were among four killed in the raid. A suicide truck bomb killed 10 people and destroyed an important bridge linking Baghdad to the north, while 15 corpses identified as Sunni Arabs were found dumped by a highway.
Five US service personnel were also killed yesterday when a military transport helicopter crashed during a routine flight west of Baghdad. The military said 16,000 US and Iraqi troops were involved in Operation Lightning Hammer against Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda in the fertile crescent of the Diyala River north of Baghdad.
US and Iraqi soldiers started the operation with a late-night air assault, focusing on militants who fled an earlier crackdown in the provincial capital Baquba. The operation has been described as part of the larger countrywide Operation Phantom Strike, which was announced on Monday.
Al-Qaeda is seen as trying to influence debate in Washington by stepping up attacks in Iraq before a crucial progress report on the war is delivered to Congress on September 15th. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said US forces would launch a series of operations over the next 30 days. "We fully expect that al-Qaeda in Iraq would like to increase their attacks during this critical period."
US military offensives have been under way in Baghdad in recent months and surrounding provinces like Diyala, which have seen some of the worst violence. Police in the Diyala town of Khalis said they found 15 corpses identified as Sunni Arabs, executed by gunshots and dumped on the Baghdad and Kirkuk highway.
A bridge over a branch of the Tigris River collapsed when a truck bomb exploded at the middle, sending three cars into the water, police said. Ten people were killed and six wounded. Police and an oil industry source said gunmen had also kidnapped a senior official of Iraq's state oil marketing organisation, although details of the incident were sketchy.
The US has sent an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq this year
and moved them from large bases into small neighbourhood outposts
in an effort to reduce sectarian violence. US forces say they have
had success, especially
against Sunni Arab militants who were their main enemies for
the first three years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
They have faced more violence from Shia militia, who, they say, have ties to neighbouring Shia Muslim Iran. Imam Ali Hospital in Sadr City said it had received three bodies, including a five-year-old girl and her father, shot dead during the US raid. US military spokesman Lieut Col Christopher Garver said troops fired only "at people who fired at them".
The raid was meant to capture amilitant leader using materials smuggled from Iran to carry out killings, US forces said. - (Reuters)