BAGHDAD, June 17: US marines, sailors and Iraqi soldiers backed by warplanes battled insurgents in Iraq’s Euphrates River valley on Friday in a new operation to rout them from near the Syrian border.

US fighter jets struck suspected insurgent safe houses with guided bombs on Friday, destroying three buildings, the US military said.

Four civilians were wounded in fighting, including two women.

“The civilians were wounded after insurgents seized their home and fired at Marines and soldiers,” the military said.

The 1,000-strong Operation Spear is to round up “insurgents and foreign fighters and disrupt insurgent support systems in and around Karabilah” in restive northwestern Al-Anbar province.

Insurgents are believed to cross into Iraq from Syria in the lawless border region, where US marine air strikes killed about 40 people on June 11.

The US military said, meanwhile, that two marines were killed Thursday when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb in nearby Ramadi, west of Baghdad.

As the massive military operation kicked off, US military and Iraqi officials said they were continuing to deal death blows to an Al Qaeda-linked group believed to be behind much of Iraq’s violence.

Around 21 major players in Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Organisation of Al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers have been killed or captured in the past several months, US Lieutnenant Colonel Steven Boylan said.

Zarqawi, Iraq’s most wanted man with a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head, is believed to be responsible for some of the most deadly attacks and hostage-takings in Iraq.

Arrests of figures like Mohammed Khalaf Shakar, said to be a top Zarqawi aide, “prove that heads have begun to roll one after another and that the terrorists are living their last days,” Iraqi defense ministry spokesman Saleh Sarhan told AFP.

Shakar and another suspected Al Qaeda ringleader were arrested earlier in the week, the US military and police said.

“There is cooperation now from people who hesitated to give us information before, who see that most of the attacks are against civilians, not US troops or the Iraqi army,” Sarhan said.

In attacks on Friday, at least five Iraqis were wounded, including two members of the elite police Wolf Brigade when a suicide car bomb exploded next to a truck carrying inflammable material in Baghdad.

Another 11 people were wounded in a suicide car bombing against an army patrol in Tuz Khormatu, north of Baghdad.—AFP