Four American and four Italian military personnel were killed in separate aircraft crashes, military officials said yesterday, as Iraq's prime minister condemned the arrest of a top Sunni political leader by US troops.
Monday's 12-hour detention of Iraqi Islamic Party leader Mohsen Abdul-Hamid did little to help American efforts to entice Iraq's once-dominant Sunni community back into the political fold. Many Sunnis feel slighted by the rise to power of the country's Shiite majority, which claimed political control following Saddam Hussein's ouster two years ago.
Iraq's raging insurgency, which has killed more than 760 people since the new Shiite-led government was announced April 28, is believed to be strongly backed by radical Sunni extremists.
The arrests came after the launch of Operation Lightning, a large-scale anti-insurgent campaign that entered its third day yesterday.
"We have so far achieved good results and rounded up a large number of saboteurs, some are Iraqis and some are non-Iraqis," Iraqi President al-Jaafari said without elaborating.
The operation, which will see more than 40,000 Iraqi security forces deployed to the capital's streets, aims at ridding Baghdad of militants and, in particular, suicide car bombers, the deadliest and regular weapon of choice for insurgents.
But despite government efforts to curb the violence, insurgents launched attacks inside Baghdad and north of the capital.
Gunmen shot dead Jerges Mohammed Sultan, an Iraqi journalist working for Iraqi state TV channel Al-Iraqiya, as he left his house in the northern city of Mosul, said Baha-aldin al-Bakri from al-Jumhouri hospital.
Insurgents have in the past targeted both the station, which has been mortared, and its journalists. One of its anchorwomen, Raiedah Mohammed Wageh Wazan, was kidnapped and killed in late February.
A suicide car bomber killed two Iraqi soldiers in an early morning attack on an army checkpoint near Buhriz, about 60km north of Baghdad, said Diyala provincial police spokesman Ali Fadhil.
Five gunmen fired from a speeding car on a police patrol in eastern Baghdad's Dora district, wounding four policemen, said police Captain Firas Qaiti.
On Monday, at least 27 policemen were killed and 118 wounded after two terrorists carrying explosives blew themselves up among a crowd of 500 commandos protesting a government move to disband their special forces unit in Hillah, about 95km south of Baghdad.
In an apparent claim of responsibility, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda in Iraq said in an alleged Internet statement saying one of its members attacked "a group of special Iraqi forces." The same group had claimed responsibility for a Feb. 28 attack against police recruits in Hillah that killed 125 people.
Militants, particularly extremists entering from neighboring states, regard Iraqi security forces as prime targets in their campaign against the US military, which hinges its eventual exit from Iraq on the ability of local soldiers and police to handle the insurgency.
The Iraqi single-engine Comp Air 7SL aircraft crashed near the village of Jalula, about 130km northeast of Baghdad, said US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Fred Wellman.
The aircraft, one of seven used by the Iraqi Air Force used for surveillance and personnel transport, had departed a Kirkuk air base bound for Jalula when it crashed, the military said in a statement. It was not immediately clear what caused the crash, which killed four US Air Force members and an Iraqi pilot, Wellman said.
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