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BAGHDAD, July 24: Three more US soldiers were killed in Iraq on Thursday as US authorities prepared to release photographs of the dead sons of Saddam Hussein to convince a sceptical Iraqi public that they are not coming back.
The soldiers died in an ambush near Mosul, where Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed in a blistering assault on Tuesday, and followed a US military warning of a spike in attacks in response to the deadly raid.
Mosul is a multi-ethnic city with a Sunni majority in the Kurdish-dominated north and has seen only rare strikes on US forces. One soldier was killed and seven were wounded near the town on Wednesday in a bomb attack.
The dead and wounded belonged to the 101st Airborne Division, which led a four-hour assault on the mansion where Saddam Hussein’s sons were holed up along with a bodyguard and Qusay’s teenage son before killing them all.
A total of 95 US soldiers have now died in both combat and non-combat incidents since major operations were declared over on May 1. Of those, 44 were killed in attacks.
The top US commander in Iraq, Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, warned on Wednesday of a possible increase in attacks after the deaths of Uday and Qusay, two of the three most wanted members of the former Iraqi government.
“We’ll continue to see fighting, we may in fact see a spike in the next couple of days,” he told journalists in Baghdad.
Despite the US military hailing the deaths of the pair of aces as a major coup for their campaign, they are battling with deeply ingrained suspicion — a hangover from Saddam’s government — with many incredulous that the two are dead.
TWO IRAQIS KILLED: With the security situation on the ground still fragile, two Iraqis were killed on Thursday when their car failed to stop at an improvised US checkpoint in Baghdad. It was unclear if they were shot dead or died in an ensuing blaze.
“The car was speeding in the direction of the Americans. I tried to warn them, I waved my hands. They hit the brake as they bumped into the barbed wire fence,” said Khodayir Haidar Ali, 42, who was wounded in the incident.
“Within one minute of the shots the vehicle burst into flames,” he added.
An eyewitness at the scene said the charred torsos of two people were slumped inside the burned debris of the vehicle.
Witnesses said the incident followed a search by US troops of a mosque, which resulted in the arrest of three people, believed to belong to Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen militia.
A US military spokesman said he was unable to confirm the incident.
MINISTERS: The acting chairman of Iraq’s governing council said on Thursday the interim body would in the next two weeks appoint ministers and establish a working party to prepare the ground for a new constitution.
The council would also aim by Monday to establish procedural rules for the 25-member body, including selecting a chairman and agreeing internal voting procedures, Mohammed Bahr al-Uloom said.
The council, unveiled on July 13 and roughly representative of Iraq’s mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, has yet to make any major substantive decisions and has already been labelled illegitimate by both Sunni and Shia groups.
HUMVEE DESTROYED: A US soldier was wounded in south Baghdad on Thursday when a military vehicle came under attack, a soldier at the scene told AFP.
“One soldier was injured,” the soldier at the scene said, asking not to be named.
Military officials refused to say what happened in the incident, in which a light armoured Humvee vehicle was charred, the front badly mangled from an explosion.
They also declined to say what condition the wounded soldier was in.
Several residents of the area said they were convinced an assailant fired a single rocket-propelled grenade from an alleyway at about 4:10pm (1210 GMT), striking the first of two Humvees in a convoy along a thoroughfare in Saydiya locality.
“I heard a powerful explosion,” said resident Ammar Dulaymi. “It sounded like an RPG.”—AFP
