Shiite militiamen attacked a US convoy in southern Iraq, killing two soldiers and setting vehicles on fire, even as mediators were trying yesterday to find a resolution to the US standoff with the militia's leader. Two other American soldiers were killed in Baghdad.
The convoy attack came Saturday evening outside the city of Amarah, 300km south of the capital, when gunmen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr opened fire with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, a US military official said.
A number of Humvees and trucks were in flames on the road outside the city hours later, witnesses said.
British forces battled members of al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army militia for 12 hours in Amarah in fighting that lasted until early yesterday and left five Iraqis dead and eight British soldiers wounded.
The clash began when gunmen attacked a British patrol, wounding one soldier, said a British military spokesman. Five more troops were wounded as a team rescued the first man, said British Royal Air Force Squadron Leader Jonathan Arnold, a military spokesman.
In the evening, the fighting revived when insurgents fired mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades at the British base in the city, and British soldiers lobbed flares into the night sky to illuminate and fire on the attackers. Two more British soldiers were wounded. Witnesses said two British trucks were burned in the fighting. An Iraqi civilian working on the base was wounded by shrapnel from an exploding mortar shell, the British military said.
Two more US soldiers were killed before dawn yesterday in an attack in northwest Baghdad that also wounded two Iraqi security officers and another American, the military said, without providing details on the attack.
The deaths raised the US death toll to 144 since a wave of violence began on April 1. At least 746 US troops have died in Iraq since the war began in March last year. Up to 1,200 Iraqis also have been killed this month.
Meanwhile, Marines who pulled back from enforcing a cordon on the southern Fallujah had returned to their previous duties, patrolling villages away from the city, giving way to a newly created Iraqi brigade that the Americans said would root out die-hard guerrillas in the Sunni militant stronghold.
US Marine Lieutenant-General James Conway said the US withdrawal did not mean a let-up in the pursuit of the guerrillas.
RSS