BAGHDAD, 21 November 2004 — US and Iraqi troops yesterday took the battle against insurgents from Fallujah to Mosul and Baghdad was again rocked by violence as rebels launched an assault on a police station and five civil servants were assassinated.
Gunmen launched an assault on a police station in Baghdad’s Azamiyah neighborhood, a day after US and Iraqi troops rounded up more than 30 suspects following Friday prayers in the Abu Hanifa Mosque.
One policeman was killed and another wounded in the attack, which saw US helicopters deployed in response, amid fears that insurgents who managed to flee the massive anti-insurgency operation in Fallujah were regrouping in Baghdad.
The group of Al-Qaeda frontman in Iraq Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi — one of the main targets of the Fallujah campaign — claimed responsibility for the assault against the police in a statement posted on the Internet.
In a separate incident, a senior Public Works Ministry official and four of her aides were gunned down in broad daylight as they were driving to work in Baghdad, a ministry spokesman said.
One US soldier was also killed and nine others wounded when their unit came under attack in central Baghdad, bringing to 1,214 the number of US troops killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.
Elsewhere in the capital at least one person was killed when a suicide bomber tried to attack a civilian convoy.
Meanwhile in Mosul, nine Iraqi soldiers were feared dead after US troops taking part in a major operation to root out the insurgency in the large northern city discovered bodies.
The men, discovered in an industrial area not far from the scene of some of the worst clashes in Mosul, appeared to have been killed by a bullet to the head.
Senior Iraqi and US military sources said they probably belonged to an Iraqi Army unit that had joined US troops for the attack, which was launched more than a week after rebels overran police stations in the city and torched other buildings.
A force of about 1,200 soldiers and 1,600 Iraqi security forces took to the streets Tuesday to restore order, in the latest major push to reclaim rebel enclaves in Iraq.
At least 15 insurgents have been killed and 45 suspects detained over the last 24 hours while US-backed Iraqi commandos Friday stormed a suspected rebel position in Mosul’s old city, a warren of cramped streets and crumbling houses.
But US Army commander Col. Robert Brown said operations in Mosul would differ greatly from the ferocious attacks that leveled large swathes of the Sunni strongholds of Fallujah and Samarra.
“You are using intelligence to go precisely where the enemy is, you go and find them where they are and allow them no safe harbor,” said Brown, who commands the 1st Stryker Brigade.
A rebel leader in Fallujah said that Omar Hadid, a senior aide to Zarqawi thought to be one of the main military commanders of the Fallujah rebellion, was wounded in the assault.
In further unrest, five Iraqis were killed yesterday in violence in the city of Ramadi, to the west of Fallujah.
Violence has also raged north of Baghdad around the towns of Tikrit, Samarra and Baiji in recent days, while insurgents dynamited a key bridge and destroyed power lines in Latifiyah, a town which commands access to much of southern Iraq from Baghdad and has been dubbed “Fallujah’s second head”.
With the US military stretched thinner than ever by a nationwide crackdown against rebels ahead of a planned January vote, top brass said tours of duty could be extended and Washington vented its resentment at the lack of help from leading European powers.
Germany, along with fellow anti-war NATO members Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Spain, went along with the decision to set up the Baghdad training mission but have refused to permit their officers stationed at NATO’s two operations bases to participate, they said.
But in Berlin, Germany announced that the Paris Club had reached a framework agreement to forgive 80 percent of Iraq’s crippling $120 billion debt.
The agreement comes ahead of the Nov. 22-23 conference on Iraq to be held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, during which Iraq is hoping to muster international support for the transition process.
— Additional input from agencies
