Iraq

U.S. forces attack in Sunni areas

BAGHDAD - U.S. troops went on the offensive from the gates of Baghdad to the Syrian border Tuesday, pounding Sunni insurgent positions from the air and supporting Iraqi soldiers in raids on mosques suspected of harboring extremists.

American and Iraqi forces launched the operations ahead of Ramadan, expected to start at week's end, in an apparent attempt at preventing a repeat of the insurgent violence that took place at the start of last year's Muslim holy month.

Clashes broke out in a string of militant strongholds from Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, northward along the Euphrates Valley to the Syrian border town of Qaim - all major conflict areas.

Some of the sharpest exchanges took place in Hit, 95 miles northwest of Baghdad, where residents and hospital officials said U.S. aircraft attacked two sites, killing two people and wounding five. The U.S. command had no comment.

U.S. helicopters fired on a mosque in Hit on Monday and set it ablaze after the military said insurgents opened fire on Marines from the sanctuary. Scattered clashes were reported overnight, killing at least two Iraqis and wounding 15, hospital official said.

Insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard outpost east of Qaim on Tuesday, the U.S. military said. The local hospital reported 15 to 20 people were killed.

Seventy miles west of Baghdad, Iraqi troops backed by U.S. soldiers and Marines raided seven mosques in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, arresting a locally prominent member of a clerical association and three other people. They also seized bombmaking materials and "insurgent propaganda" in the mosques, U.S. officials said.

In Baghdad, the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni clerical group suspected of links to the insurgency, condemned the mosque raids as an example of American hostility toward Islam.

"I think there is a religious ideology that drives the American troops," said the association's official spokesman, Mohammed Bashar al-Faydhi. "President Bush has said at the beginning of the war that this is a "crusade,' " he said, referring to the Christian attacks on Muslims in the Middle Ages.

The raids followed a surge in insurgent attacks in Ramadi, and the U.S. command accused the militants of violating the sanctity of the mosques by using them for military purposes. A Marine spokesman, Maj. Francis Piccoli, said U.S. troops provided backup for the Iraqi soldiers but did not enter the mosques.

In Fallujah, the focal point for Sunni resistance, residents reported explosions and clashes on the eastern edge of the city Tuesday afternoon. At least five people were killed and four wounded in the blasts, according to Fallujah General Hospital. The victims were reportedly traveling in a truck and two cars on a highway outside the city when they came under fire.

The U.S. command said the clashes began when insurgents in Fallujah opened fire on troops from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. After the rebels began firing mortars, the Marines called in air support, and a U.S. warplane "dropped a precision-guided weapon, eliminating the insurgent fire," the military said.

The renewed activity around Fallujah followed a pair of predawn airstrikes, which the U.S. command said targeted hideouts and meeting places of the feared Monotheism and Holy War, the terrorist group responsible for numerous kidnappings and beheadings of foreign hostages.

One of the airstrikes flattened a well known Fallujah restaurant and the other destroyed a building in another part of the city. Five people were killed and two were wounded in the two attacks, hospital officials reported.

Tuesday's airstrikes in Fallujah were the first in four days and occurred as Iraqi officials were in talks to restore government control, which disintegrated after the Marines ended a three-week siege in late April.

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