Iraq:Thousands of US troops swept into the northern and southern outskirts of Baghdad yesterday in simultaneous strikes against insurgents that the military said was the start of a "summer of hard fighting" in Iraq.
The operations signal a new phase in Washington's Iraq strategy. The military is going on the offensive to crush al-Qaeda and other militants, who have defied a major crackdown to secure Baghdad by hiding out in the farmlands and towns bordering the Iraqi capital.
Gunmen kidnapped eight Christian university students and a lecturer in northern Iraq yesterday, police said.
They said the group was snatched off a bus east of Mosul. The students were going home after completing exams. Militants often target Iraq's tiny Christian community. Thousands of Christians have fled Iraq in recent years, joining an exodus of 2 million Iraqis who have sought a safer life, mainly in neighbouring countries.
North of Baghdad, 10,000 mostly US troops, supported by attack helicopters and armoured fighting vehicles, pressed on with a two-day offensive against al-Qaeda militants in volatile Diyala province.
At least 41 militants have been killed and large quantities of weapons seized, the military said.
South of the capital, soldiers, including airborne troops in Chinook helicopters, killed four suspected insurgents, detained 62, seized 10 weapons caches and destroyed 17 boats, disrupting militant operations on the Tigris River, the US military said.
"Our forces are on the offensive but we face a summer of hard fighting," US military spokesman Admiral Mark Fox said in Baghdad.
The US military launched the operations after the fifth and final reinforcing brigade of US troops arrived in Iraq, completing its troop "surge" or build-up.
"We are now seeing the true surge in full force," Admiral Fox said. "You are going to see operations simultaneously conducted and well co-ordinated through all the different provinces."
US president George Bush has sent 28,000 extra soldiers to help curb sectarian bloodshed and buy Shia prime minister Nuri al-Maliki time to reach a political accommodation with disaffected minority Sunnis.
The four-month-old security crackdown is focused on Baghdad, epicentre of the violence. While US and Iraqi forces have reduced the levels of bloodshed in the capital, militants have shifted the fight to other provinces such as Diyala.
Al-Qaeda fighters have used it as a launchpad for large-scale suicide and car bomb attacks on the capital, such as the one that struck a Shia mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 87 people.
In the aftermath of the attack, three Sunni mosques were targeted in Iskandariya and Jbela, two towns south of Baghdad, police said yesterday.
With the violence continuing to exact a deadly toll on Iraqis and US soldiers, Mr Bush is under growing pressure from Democrats in Congress to show progress in his new Iraq strategy or start pulling out troops, something he has rejected so far.
The top US general in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, and US ambassador Ryan Crocker are due to deliver a report in September and make recommendations. Analysts say it will be a watershed in the unpopular four-year-old war.
Residents reported heavy clashes between US troops and militants in districts on the western bank of the Diyala River that splits the city in two.
Police Col Raghi Radh said masked members of the 1920 Revolution Brigade, a Sunni insurgent group that has clashed with al-Qaeda, were seen operating with US troops and had set up bases to interrogate suspects.
Col Radh said the US troops were being hampered by roadside bombs and were having to detonate them as they proceeded.
- (Reuters)