No let up in violence as gunmen clash with US troops
Monday March 20 2006
Iraqi police said eight civilians, including a child, were killed in clashes between US troops and gunmen in Duluiyah, 45 miles north of Baghdad.
The town is located in Iraq's Sunni heartland where the Iraqi army and US forces opened an airborne campaign last week to hunt down insurgents, in the largest American "air assault" operation since the 2003 invasion.
Elsewhere, two civilians were killed and 10 wounded when gunmen attacked US troops stationed at the governor's office in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad.
Bodies dumped
In the capital, police found the bullet-riddled bodies of three men bound hand and foot and dumped in the southeast neighbourhood of Rustamiyah. The victims appeared to be the latest in the wave of revenge killings after the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.
The mortar round fired at the holy city of Karbala landed in a parking lot a half mile from the shrine that was the destination of the pilgrims marking the 40th and final day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson. No one was hurt.
In violence against police, gunmen killed four guards at archaeological sites in the northern city of Mosul. A fifth policeman and a bystander were wounded.
A roadside bomb exploded on a police patrol in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing one officer and injuring 10 others, and a Baghdad policeman driving on a rural road in Latifiyah, about 20 miles south of the Iraqi capital, was also killed by gunmen, police said.
