BAGHDAD, Oct 17: About 70 guerillas were killed in US air strikes in the Ramadi region of western Iraq, where five US and two Iraqi soldiers were killed in a weekend roadside bombing, the US military said on Monday.

Fifty of the guerillas were killed on Sunday in raids by helicopters and fighter jets on a suspected safe house in the Abu Faraj region north of Ramadi, where suspects were loading vehicles with weapons, the military said in a statement.

Another 20 were killed just east of the town when a fighter jet fired a precision-guided bomb as some people were in the process of planting a roadside bomb, it said.

A bomb planted at the same spot killed five US soldiers on Saturday. —AFP