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U.S., Iraqi troops kill 30 militants

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published January 25, 2007

BAGHDAD - U.S. and Iraqi troops battled Sunni insurgents hiding in high-rise buildings on Haifa Street in the heart of Baghdad Wednesday, with snipers on roofs taking aim at gunmen in open windows as Apache attack helicopters hovered overhead.

Iraq said 30 militants were killed and 27 captured.

Violence was unrelenting in Iraq on Wednesday, with at least 69 people killed or found dead, including 33 tortured bodies found in separate locations in Baghdad.

With President Bush pushing a controversial plan to increase troop strength in Iraq, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the latest joint raid was aimed at clearing the Haifa Street area of "terrorists and outlaws" targeting residents. He promised such operations would continue as U.S. and Iraqi troops prepare for a broader security crackdown to stanch the sectarian bloodletting.

It was the third bid this month to clear militants from the neighborhood, about a mile north of the Green Zone, site of the U.S. and British embassies as well as the Iraqi government headquarters.

The U.S. military said the combined force in the operation, dubbed Tomahawk Strike II, detained seven suspected insurgents and seized heavy weapons.

At least one civilian was killed and seven were wounded, hospital and police officials said.

The military reported separately that an American soldier was killed Wednesday in clashes near the city's center, but officials declined to give more specifics or say whether the death was connected to the Haifa Street fighting. Two U.S. Marines also were reported killed on Tuesday during combat in Anbar province, the military said.

Confusion still cloaked the circumstances of the downing of a private U.S. security company helicopter on Tuesday, with U.S. and Iraqi officials saying four of five Americans who died in the incident were shot execution-style. The aircraft, belonging to the Blackwater USA security company, went down as it flew over a dangerous Sunni neighborhood where a gunfight raged.

An anonymous senior Iraqi military official told the Associated Press that a machine gunner downed the helicopter and that four of the men were shot execution-style on the ground, but an anonymous U.S. military official in Washington said there were no indications the aircraft had been shot out of the sky. Three Sunni insurgent groups separately claimed responsibility for the crash, with one posting on its Web site the ID cards of one of the Americans.

In Washington, an anonymous U.S. defense official told the AP that four of the five were shot in the back of the head, but he did not know whether they were alive when shot.

It was the second helicopter crash in Iraq in four days.

Also concerning Iraq

In Britain: Lawmakers attacked Prime Minister Tony Blair's Iraq policy on Wednesday in their first major debate since 2004 on the invasion, but the British leader skipped the session and rejected calls to withdraw troops by October.

On Iran: Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said Wednesday he would reveal details "in the coming days" that he vowed would show Iranian interference in Iraq. He said one of the Iranians detained by U.S. forces in Iraq during two raids over the past month was the director of operations for Iran's Revolutionary Guard Quds faction, the organization responsible for funding and arming Iraqi militants.

Times wires

[Last modified January 25, 2007, 01:43:54]