BAGHDAD, 15 March 2004 — Senior officials met to discuss how the country will be run from July as roadside bombs killed six US soldiers in Iraq over the weekend, and unhappy Iraqis protested about their interim constitution.
Three US troops from the 1st Armored Division were killed and a fourth was wounded when a bomb exploded Saturday night as they patrolled southeast Baghdad.
“One of our reconnaissance patrols struck an improvised explosive device, the blast caused the vehicle to roll into a canal,” a senior military official said.
Hours later, west of the city, a newly arrived soldier from the US National Guard died when his convoy hit a separate bomb early yesterday morning.
“It was sadly yet another roadside bomb,” the senior official said. The soldier, who was set to work with the 1st Infantry Division (1ID), died from his wounds while being taken to hospital, the official added.
It has been a bad weekend for the 1ID, which is replacing the 4ID as part of the biggest troop rotation since World War II, losing five soldiers to roadside bombs, the biggest killer of US military personnel in Iraq.
On Saturday morning, two 1ID soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in the northern city of Tikrit — the hometown of former President Saddam Hussein.
Another US soldier was in critical but stable condition yesterday after being stabbed several times by an unknown attacker in the US-led coalition’s headquarters in Baghdad just after midnight, a US military official said. And the body of a policeman from Fallujah, west of Baghdad, who disappeared two days ago, was discovered riddled with bullet holes, a police officer said.
Away from the violence, US overseer in Iraq Paul Bremer and a White House expert on political process, Robert Blackwill, held meetings with members of Iraq’s interim Governing Council on how to move forward after the signing of a temporary constitution.
Council members say their immediate priorities are to fix the caretaker government and devise a system for direct elections, before overcoming a series of problems that have been raised with the content of the interim constitution.
