BAGHDAD, 19 June 2006 — US and Iraqi forces were surrounding the town of Ramadi yesterday by setting up new checkpoints on all the entry and exit roads in a bid to bottle up the insurgents.
A US military spokesman said additional checkpoints were set up “to restrict the flow of insurgents, but citizens will still be able to enter and leave the city.” “This is just one part of a long-term plan to restore stability in Ramadi,” the spokesman told AFP.
He said the operation was still “part of the continuous operations that the coalition forces and Iraqi forces have been conducting for several months.” But yesterday the forces were “getting more into it and focusing on multiple sites used by the insurgents to plan and conduct terrorist attacks and store weapons.” The operation was being conducted jointly by US soldiers, marines and Iraqi troops, with the US military’s 1st Brigade of the 1st armored division acting as lead unit.
He said the forces had set up assembling areas for displaced people from the town to the east and west of Ramadi, but added: “We have no idea how many people have left their homes.” Earlier yesterday the military insisted that it had neither launched “any major operation” nor deployed additional troops to the restive city after the BBC reported overnight troop movements on its southern outskirts.
“Our operations in Ramadi have been on for quite some time now, and there is no major operation launched at the moment such as the Fallujah one,” military spokesman Maj. William Wilhoite told AFP.
In violence yesterday, gunmen abducted 10 bakery workers in Baghdad yesterday, and a militant group linked to Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for some of the bombings that killed 43 people in the capital the day before.
Police said 10 bodies, shot and showing signs of torture, were found in different parts of Baghdad overnight. In a volatile area north of the capital, gunmen shot dead three people in the city of Baquba.
The Mujahedeen Shoura Council, which had pledged to continue what it described as the holy war against crusader forces until “doomsday”, said in a statement that it was behind four Baghdad bombs on Saturday, out of the seven reported by police.
It described one attack, a car bomb at a checkpoint in east Baghdad that police said killed 11 people, as “a blessed operation that led to the torching of three cars and the killing of the soldiers around the building.”
