Ambush In Baghdad
Two U.S. soldiers were killed in Baghdad on Friday, one when insurgents attacked a convoy transporting fuel on the west side of the capital, the military said. An Iraqi driver in the convoy was also killed.
Also, two American soliders and a number of civilian contractors were missing after the convoy attack, Pentagon officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Twelve others were wounded in the assault, including an Iraqi civilian believed nearby when the attack set off fires, officials said. It was not immediately clear if any of the wounded were U.S. troops.
"These were fuel trucks," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said at a Baghdad news conference. "When they were attacked by the enemy, they probably had a collateral effect on other vehicles on the road."
Three Marines were killed a day earlier in Al Anbar province, west of Baghdad, the military said on Friday. It wasn't clear if they died in Fallujah, where Marines have been battling insurgents since Monday. Fallujah is a major city in the province.
In Friday's violence, gunmen carrying automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades struck a tanker truck in a convoy in Abu Ghraib on the main highway entering western Baghdad, killing a soldier. A huge cloud of black smoke was seen rising over the city from the scene of the attack.
The second soldier was killed in an attack using roadside bombs and small arms on Camp Cooke, a U.S. base in northern Baghdad, the military said.
At least 646 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.
CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier reports historical enemies Shi'ite militia and Sunni militants are fighting in their own towns and regions, pursuing a common goal: to drive the occupiers out. The fear that Iraq's different ethnic and religious factions might turn on each other has been replaced by a new nightmare: that they are uniting to fight the Americans, says Dozier.
In major developments:
For the first time, U.S. troops moved in strength into the heartland of the rebellion by the militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. More than 1,000 troops backed by tanks pushed into the southern city of Kut, retaking police stations and government buildings seized this week by Shiite gunmen.
Elsewhere, fighting with al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army militia diminished. Coalition forces largely left gunmen in firm control in three cities of south central Iraq, and further south, coalition troops have largely succeeded in taming the uprising, though Italian troops still saw light fighting in the city of Nasiriyah.
In Fallujah, Marines halted their assault on Sunni insurgents to allow U.S.-picked Iraqi leaders — angry at the United States over the bloodshed from five days of heavy fighting — to hold talks with city leaders about how to reduce the violence.
Throughout the afternoon, fighting was reduced to sporadic gunfire. But when night fell, heavy explosions resumed as an AC-130 gunship strafed targets and soldiers and insurgents engaged in a mortar battle.
The AC-130 hit a cave near Fallujah where insurgents took refuge after attacking Marines. A 500-pound laser-guided bomb also struck the cave, said spokesman 1st Lt. Eric Knapp.
Iraq's top U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, said the unilateral pause was also aimed at allowing humanitarian aid to enter the city and Fallujah residents to tend to their dead.
Many families, emerging from their homes for the first time in days, buried slain relatives in the city football stadium.
A stream of hundreds of cars carrying women, children and elderly headed out of the city after Marines announced they would be allowed to leave. Families pleaded to be allowed to take out men, and when Marines refused, some entire families turned back.
The heavy fighting in Fallujah — during which mosques have been damaged and buildings demolished — has made the city of 200,000 a symbol of resistance for some Iraqis and threatens to divide the Iraqi Governing Council and the U.S. administration that appointed it.
Military hesitation over the halt in fighting was clear. After initially being ordered to cease all offensive operations, Marines quickly demanded and received permission to launch assaults to prevent attacks if needed.
"We said to them (the commanders): 'We are going to lose people if we don't go back on offensive ops.' So we got the word," Marine Maj. Pete Farnun told The Associated Press.
We are at a moment of testing in Iraq," White House communications director Dan Bartlett told the CBS News Early Show. "The reason is because the enemies of democracy know the stakes are high."
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt underlined that talks between two Governing Council members and sheiks and clerics representing Fallujah representatives were not negotiations, suggesting the military would not be making concessions. U.S. officials were not participating in the talks, which began Friday.
The Governing Council early Saturday issued a statement demanding an end to military action and "collective punishment" — a reference to the Fallujah siege.
Abdul-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi, a Shiite on the Governing Council, announced he was suspending his council seat until "the bleeding stops in all Iraq." He also met Friday with al-Sadr, whom U.S. commanders have vowed to capture.
A Sunni council member, Ghazi al-Yawer, said he would quit if the Fallujah talks fell through.
One of the strongest pro-U.S. voices on the council, also a Sunni, Adnan Pachachi, denounced the U.S. siege. "It was not right to punish all the people of Fallujah, and we consider these operations by the Americans unacceptable and illegal," Pachachi told Al-Arabiya TV.
Meanwhile, in a signal of how U.S. forces face a new enemy in Iraq, two pictures of al-Sadr hung from a sculpture in Baghdad's central Firdos Square, where one year ago Marines toppled a statue of Saddam.
A U.S. soldier climbed a ladder to tear down the posters, and the military warned that al-Sadr's followers were planning bomb attacks in the area. Hours later, a mortar hit nearby, shaking two hotels where foreign journalists and contractors are staying.
U.S. troops drove into Kut before dawn Friday, pushing out members of al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army militia that seized the southern textile and farming center this week after Ukrainian troops abandoned the city under heavy attack.
A U.S. helicopter struck al-Sadr's main office in Kut, killing two people, witnesses said. Americans were patrolling the streets during daylight.
Kimmitt said he expected the operation to retake Kut would be finished by Saturday morning. "We are fairly comfortable that the town of al-Kut is well on its way to coming back under coalition control," he said.
Still, he suggested a move against al-Sadr's militia controlling parts of Najaf and Karbala would have to wait, because hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims are in the area this weekend for al-Arbaeen, which commemorates the end of the period of mourning for a 7th-century martyred saint.
"We expect that those special cities that are currently observing the Arbaeen will continue to have some al-Sadr presence," he told reporters.
Al-Sadr on Friday demanded U.S. forces leave Iraq, saying they now face "a civil revolt."
"I direct my speech to my enemy Bush and I tell him ... you are fighting the entire Iraqi people," al-Sadr said in a sermon, delivered by one of his deputies at the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, Shiite Islam's holiest site.
Al-Sadr, a young, firebrand anti-U.S. cleric, is thought to be holed up in his office in Najaf, protected by scores of gunmen. He has said he is willing to die resisting any American attempt to capture him.
Gunmen on the highway outside Baghdad were seen stopping a car carrying two Western civilians — apparently private security guards, because both had sidearms. The gunmen pulled the men from the car, firing at the ground to warn them to obey. Their fate was not known.
The heavy fighting for Fallujah was prompted by the March 31 slaying of four U.S. civilians there. Their burned bodies were mutilated and dragged through the streets by a mob that hung two of them from a bridge.