|
Baghdad: A US airstrike struck checkpoints manned by US-allied Sunni fighters north of Baghdad on Saturday, killing six guards and wounding two.
The US military did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Three US soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing, the military said, bringing the American death toll since the war's start five years ago closer to 4,000.
Two Iraqi civilians also were killed in the attack northwest of Baghdad.
A police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorised to release the information, said the six members of the so-called Awakening Council were killed and two others were wounded when an airstrike hit two checkpoints about 100 metres apart in Samarra.
Stopping by
The airstrikes came some two hours after US soldiers stopped at the two checkpoints to meet with the Sunni fighters, according to a local leader for the so-called Awakening Council in the Tigris River city, 95km north of Baghdad.
"They asked us general questions like: have you got your IDs and do you need anything and then they left," Sabbar Al Bazi told The Associated Press.
"Two hours later, after I had gone home, I heard two explosions, probably caused by two missiles, and machine-gun fire from a helicopter," Al Bazi said.
AP Television News footage of the aftermath showed bloodstained rocks and bits of flesh surrounding the checkpoint.
Awakening Council members, their faces masked, wore bright yellow vests, apparently to identify themselves as members of friendly groups for US forces, as they loaded bodies into a pickup.
Lieutenant Colonel Dhiya Mahmoud Ahmad, an Iraqi officer, said he came to the checkpoints shortly after the incident and met with a US military officer. "He asked if I had known about this checkpoint. I told him I knew about it two days ago," Ahmad said.
US-funded Awakening Councils, which first sprung up in Anbar province and spread to Baghdad and surrounding areas, comprise mostly Sunni fighters who turned against Al Qaida in Iraq and joined forces with the Americans.
The US command credits those groups, a ceasefire by anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army militia and the addition of an extra 30,000 American troops with a drastic drop in violence countrywide.
Tensions between rival Shiite militia factions loosely associated with Al Sadr's movement have been on the rise amid a violent struggle for power in the south.
US officials have been careful to avoid accusing the young cleric of any role in recent fighting but have cracked down on his followers in volatile cities south of Baghdad and in the capital itself.
The US military officials also said insurgents had used mortars to attack a military outpost in Hillah, about 95km south of Baghdad, yesterday but no casualties were reported.
On Friday, US and Iraqi troops clashed with Shiite gunmen in southwestern Baghdad.
The US command said American helicopters fired a Hellfire missile and a 30mm cannon at gunmen who had attacked troops with mortars or rockets. Six of the gunmen were killed and three others detained, the military said.
Al Sadr proclaimed a ceasefire last August and extended it indefinitely last month. But Al Sadr's supporters have complained the Shiite-led government has used the ceasefire to accelerate a crackdown against their movement in the capital, a Shiite heartland to the south. The firebrand cleric, who led two uprisings against US-led forces in 2004, has authorised his followers to defend themselves if attacked.
Minibus bomb kills one
In other violence on Saturday, a bomb exploded on a minibus in a predominantly Shiite area in eastern Baghdad, killing at least one passenger and wounding eight others, including a woman, police said.
A roadside bomb targeting a police patrol also killed one passer-by and wounded seven other people, including five officers, in the northern city of Kirkuk, according to police Colonel Burhan Tayyeb.
An Awakening Council member in western Baghdad's Mansour neighbourhood also was killed and four others were injured in a mortar blast, police and hospital officials said.
|
