World

'Iron Fist' Airstrikes In Iraq

October 4, 2005 / 6:13 AM EDT / CBS/AP

U.S. forces launched airstrikes Monday in a town near the Syrian border in western Iraq, part of a three-day offensive against insurgents that has killed at least 36 militants since the fighting began, officials said.

In Baghdad, Iraq's oil minister narrowly survived an assassination attempt Monday when a roadside bomb blasted his seven-car convoy, killing three of his escorts, officials said.

No serious U.S. casualties have been reported in the "Iron Fist" offensive near the Syrian border by 1,000 Marines, soldiers and sailors against the al Qaeda in Iraq group.

A U.S. soldier died Saturday of wounds suffered from indirect fire in Ramadi, a militant stronghold 70 miles west of Baghdad, the military said. The death raised to 1,936 the number of U.S. military members who have died since the Iraq war began in 2003.

The U.S. military also dismissed as "patently false" a claim Sunday by al Qaeda in Iraq that its insurgents had captured two U.S. Marines in the fighting and would kill them unless all female Sunni detainees are released from U.S. and Iraqi prisons in the country.

"That al Qaeda resorts to lies and propaganda demonstrates that theirs is a losing cause," the military said, adding that all its service members were accounted for.

In related developments:

In Ramadi insurgents using rocket-propelled grenades hit two Iraqi military vehicles, and seven militants were killed in the fighting that resulted, said Capt. Jeffrey Pool, a U.S. military spokesman. Mortars also were shot at a U.S. base in Ramadi, causing no casualties, and soldiers returned fire with artillery, Pool said. Insurgents wearing black hoods were seen carrying machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in Ramadi's streets, and Iraqi civilians gathered around the two burning Iraqi army pickup trucks.

In the northern city of Mosul, a drive-by-shooting killed Nafi'a Aziz, a female member of Ninevah's provincial council, and her son, said police spokesman Brig. Saeed Ahmed. Aziz was in charge of the council's human rights committee and a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

In Kirkuk, another northern city, two Iraqi policemen were killed when their car was ambushed by suspected militants, and in the southern city of Hillah, the owner of a restaurant was killed by a roadside bomb, police said.

On Monday, coalition forces announced the arrest late last week of 12 Iraqis suspected of being involved in an illegal local committee that punishes violators of Islamic law in Sadr City, a section of Baghdad partially controlled by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr's militia, the al-Mahdi Army, was a stubborn problem for American forces until a truce was negotiated about a year ago.

Also Sunday, political differences among Iraqi leaders deepened ahead of the crucial Oct. 15 national vote on a new constitution. Talabani, Iraq's Kurdish president, urged Shiite Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari to step down over accusations he is monopolizing power in the government and ignoring his Kurdish coalition partners' demands, a spokesman for Talabani's party said.

Elsewhere, Shiite militiamen released the recently kidnapped brother of Iraq's interior minister, the freed man, Abdul-Jabbar Jabr, told Associated Press Television News.

CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey reports that the cost of U.S. forces bearing the brunt of the fight was brutally evident over the last week when a roadside bomb killed five Marines in the town of Ramad. More than 200 civilians died last week alone in car bomb and suicide attacks, a kind of politics by other means that the U.S. military cannot hope to stop on its own and

which Iraqi forces are not yet ready to handle (video).

The offensive and street fighting occurred less than two weeks before a national referendum on a new constitution. Al Qaeda in Iraq and other groups in the Sunni-led insurgency have launched a wave of violence to wreck the Oct. 15 vote, killing at least 207 people in the past eight days, including 16 U.S. troops.

The U.S. offensive in western Iraq began early Saturday in the village of Sadah and has since spread to Karabila and Rumana, two nearby towns on the banks of the Euphrates River.

On Monday, witnesses said attacks by U.S. helicopters in Rumana, and a roadside bomb explosion near an American armored vehicle there, sent black smoke up into the air.

In Karabila, U.S. forces were searching house to house for insurgents and meeting little or no resistance, witnesses said.

No casualties were reported in Monday's fighting said the witnesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for their safety, and the U.S. military command center in Baghdad.

The U.S. military says al Qaeda in Iraq, the country's most feared insurgent group, has turned the area near Iraq's border into a "sanctuary" and a way-station for foreign fighters entering from Syria.

On Sunday, Marines clashed in Karabila with insurgents who opened fire from a building in a firefight that killed eight militants, the military said.

At least 28 militants were killed in fighting Sunday, Davis said, bringing the two-day toll among insurgents to 36. There have been no serious U.S. casualties in the operation, he said.

On Monday, a CNN journalist embedded with Marines in eastern Karabilah filed video showing the house-to-house fighting. About 20 Iraqi civilians fled, and the wounded included an Iraqi mother, father and their child, who were bleeding after being hit by flying pieces of concrete.

At one point, as Marine snipers fired from rooftops and U.S. helicopters flew overhead, the Marines' advance into eastern Karabilah was slowed for about an hour by sporadic gunfire from suspected militants, CNN reported.

In Baghdad, Iraqi Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum survived an apparent assassination attempt on Monday when a roadside bomb blasted his seven-car convoy, killing three of his bodyguards, officials said.