BAGHDAD, 11 March 2008 — Five American soldiers on a foot patrol were killed yesterday in an apparent suicide bomb attack in central Baghdad, the US military said.
Four of the soldiers died at the scene and the fifth died later from wounds, the military said in a statement. The blast also injured three US soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter, the military said. The statement said the soldiers were killed “when their dismounted patrol was struck by an explosion” and “initial reports indicated the explosive device was a suicide vest.”
The military did not provide more details. The names of the soldiers were being withheld pending notification of next of kin. Yesterday’s attack was the deadliest attack since Jan. 28 when five US soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb in the northern city of Mosul.
Yesterday’s deaths brought to 3,979 the number of members of the US military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Meanwhile, two suicide bombers, one of them a woman, killed a total of six people in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad yesterday, an army officer told AFP.
The woman bomber blew herself up outside the home of tribal leader Sheikh Ghadban Al-Karkhi in Kanan, north of the provincial capital Baquba, killing him and three others, Brig. Gen. Rageb Al-Omeri said. “The bomber blew herself up as the sheikh came out of the house to meet her. The sheikh, his daughter and two of his bodyguards were killed in the attack,” Omeri said.
The second bomber blew himself up at the gate of a police station in the town of Shaharban, north of Baquba, and killed two people, Omeri said. Twenty people, two of them policemen, were also wounded in the 10:30 a.m. attack. “As the bomber tried to enter the gate of the police station compound, some policemen fired at him. He then blew himself up,” Omeri said.
Diyala province is one of the most volatile regions of Iraq and has seen a number of suicide attacks by woman bombers in recent months.
In another development, anti-US cleric Moqtada Sadr’s aides said that Sadr will remain in overall charge of his Shiite movement even as he steps back from its day-to-day operations to pursue his religious studies. Sadr has no intention of quitting Iraqi politics despite the widespread perception that he was withdrawing after he admitted on Friday that there were splits within his movement, the aides said. Sadr has “not ceased his contact with us and he remains in control of strategic decisions,” the head of the movement’s political bureau, Liwa Sumaysim, said.
