US and Iraqi troops hunted down Sunni Arab insurgents, who fought back with rifles and makeshift bombs, on the second day of an offensive in a border town that aims to quell rebellion in western Iraq before December polls.
Operation Steel Curtain, the biggest operation in the mainly Sunni desert province of Anbar in a year, met sporadic resistance today, said military officials who would not confirm a report that dozens of insurgents had been killed.
And in a separate outburst of violence north of Baghdad, masked gunmen opened fire on a minivan, killing 13 people, including a 12-day-old baby. A six-year-old boy and his 18-year-old cousin were the only survivors.
The violence raised fears of sectarian tensions driving the campaign for the December 15th election, when minority Sunni Arabs are expected to vote in large numbers for the first time.
Some 2,500 US troops and 1,000 local Iraqis, backed by tanks and air strikes, edged through mostly deserted streets in Qusayba in western Iraq, kicking down the doors of empty houses in their methodical search for foreign al Qaeda fighters.
Brigadier General Donald Alston said the forces had been met with mainly rifle fire and "improvised explosive devices", the major killer of Americans in Iraq. There had been no deaths among US and Iraqi troops or civilians, he said.
"As it stands right now we are not meeting what I would term stiff resistance," he told a news conference in Baghdad.
Black-clad insurgents armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles fired down narrow lanes and from windows at Marines and Iraqi troops on foot and in armoured vehicles, according to a New York Times reporter with the Marines in Qusayba.
Only a few blocks of the dusty town had been secured at the end of the operation's first day on Saturday, the paper said.
Fighter jets dropped 500-pound bombs during nine air strikes, while Lieutenant Colonel Dale Alford told CNN that some insurgents were fighting from schools and mosques. A journalist for CNN, with the Marines, quoted military officials saying "dozens" of fighters were killed and 50 detained.
It was the biggest operation in the mainly Sunni desert province of Anbar since weeks of fighting forced insurgents from the city of Falluja, close to Baghdad, a year ago.
Several US offensives this year in the Euphrates valley, running from the border towards the capital, have been aimed at stemming the flow of Islamist militants into Iraq.