Five US service members were killed in a rocket attack in Iraq on Monday, in the worst single toll for US troops in the country for at least two years, the US military and Iraqi security officials said.
The attack showed Iraq’s security situation is still precarious despite a decline in violence. US troops are preparing to withdraw from the country more than eight years after the invasion that toppled former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
The US military in Iraq gave few details, saying only that a base in eastern Baghdad came under “indirect fire.”
A senior Iraqi security official said the service members had died when militants fired rockets into a joint base in Baghdad’s Baladiyat district in the east of the capital.
“This morning, the American base at Loyalty Camp came under rocket attack. There was a lot of smoke inside and the Americans died in that attack in the Baladiyat area,” said the security official, who asked not to be named.
Loyalty Forward Operating Base, on the former site of Saddam’s internal security directorate, is next to Sadr City, the stronghold of anti-US Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Two suspected militants thought to have been involved in the attack were killed when a rocket exploded prematurely on the truck they were using as a launch platform, an Iraqi Interior Ministry source said.
Violence in Iraq has steadily declined since the height of sectarian conflict in 2006 to 2007, but gun and bomb attacks still occur daily, often targeting local Iraqi security forces.
At least 13 people, mostly Iraqi soldiers, were killed on Monday when a suicide bomber detonated a car in an attack on security forces in the central city of Tikrit.
Tikrit is dominated by Sunni Muslims, a minority in Iraq who were favored under Saddam. Suspected Sunni Islamists, including al-Qaeda, have carried out frequent attacks in the town and surrounding Salahuddin Province, trying to destabilize the Baghdad government and stir up sectarian tension.
US forces officially ended combat operations in Iraq in August last year ahead of a scheduled US troop withdrawal at the end of this year. US troops are now mainly involved in a support and training role, and helping Iraqi security forces in counter-terrorism operations.
US fatalities in Iraq since last year have become more sporadic. Two US soldiers were killed last month. Monday’s deaths brought the total of US military casualties in Iraq since 2003 to 4,459, the icasualties.org Web site reported.
So far this year, 29 US service members have been killed in Iraq, compared with 60 last year and 150 in 2009, the Web site said. That compares with 961 in 2007 at the height of the sectarian conflict.
About 47,000 US troops still in Iraq are due to leave by the end of this year under a security pact and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shiite-led coalition government is debating the sensitive question of whether to ask Washington to keep some of them in place.
US officials and senior Iraqi military commanders have said they believe some kind of continuing US military presence is necessary to ensure Iraq’s security and defense needs, especially in an advisory and training role.
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