World

Marines Drown In Iraq Tank Accident

May 13, 2006 / 7:41 AM EDT / CBS/AP

Four U.S. Marines died when their tank rolled off a bridge into a canal and they drowned, the military said Friday, in a region of Iraq known as the Sunni Triangle because of heavy fighting between Sunni Arab-led insurgents and coalition forces.

"This, according to the military, was not the result of enemy action. It's simply an accident," reports CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey.

"Bridges over irrigation canals are not the Golden Gate Bridge," Pizzey says. "These are narrow little bridges, sometimes only one lane, sometimes almost makeshift, like the military used to use in World War II."

The deaths raised to at least 12 the number of U.S. service members who have died in Iraq this week, according to an Associated Press count. At least 2,400 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.

In other developments:

Three U.S. Army soldiers were killed Thursday when roadside bombs hit two U.S. convoys southwest of Baghdad, the military said. The U.S. command also announced that a U.S. soldier died Tuesday from non-combat related wounds.

Gunmen killed a Sunni imam and his son in the mostly Shiite city of Basra in southern Iraq as they were leaving a mosque after Friday prayers, police said. The attack occurred one day after Iraq's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had tried to curb sectarian violence in the region by ordering all Shiite mosques to close for three days in a town near Basra where a local Sunni Arab leader had been assassinated.

The country's complex mix of Shiite, Sunni-Arab and Kurdish politicians is still trying to form a Cabinet that will make the government fully operational, three months after Iraq's freely elected Parliament took office.

Bosnia's defense minister insisted Friday that its shipments of arms to Iraq was legal, and denied a Amnesty International's allegations that some of the weapons ended up in the wrong hands.

The tank accident occurred Thursday when the four Marines with Regimental Combat Team 5 were traveling in a U.S. M1A1 Main Battle Tank near Karmah, 50 miles west of Baghdad in Anbar province where many of Iraq's Sunni Arab-led insurgent groups are based.

"We are a close-knit family and this loss affects us all," said U.S. Col. Larry D. Nicholson, commanding officer of Regimental Combat Team 5. "Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of these Marines during this difficult period."

The accident was under investigation, and the military said no other information was immediately available, including what kind of operation the Marines were taking part in and whether fighting with insurgents was under way in the area at that time.

The process of forming the new government has bogged down over who will key ministries such as defense, interior and oil.

That was clear Friday when Fadhila, a small but important Shiite political party, said it would not participate in the formation of the Cabinet. It said the Cabinet selection process was being dictated by personal interests and pressure by the United States that ran counter to the spirit of national unity.

"Fadhila wants the oil ministry, a very powerful post. They're sort of saying, 'If we can't have what we want, we're going to take our baseball home,'" says Pizzey. "That won't end the game, but it will slow it down a little."

U.S. officials, who have been playing an advisory role in the Cabinet selection process, hope a new unity government can win public confidence and quell the violence so that American and other international troops can go home.

But delays in the political process have led to a surge of sectarian violence, including the kidnapping and killing of civilians by death squads, raising fears of a civil war in Iraq.

That problem was obvious on Thursday, when U.S. and Iraqi forces rescued seven Sunni Arab men seized by suspected Shiite militiamen near Baghdad.

The kidnapping was the latest in a wave that is plaguing the country, killing hundreds of people. Many of the abductions are part of the sectarian warfare in the Iraqi capital, home to large communities of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.