A U.S. soldier was killed during a firefight in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, raising to 11 the number of American forces killed in a single day, the military said Thursday.
The soldier was shot Wednesday while manning a machine gun nest on the roof of an outpost in the city, 70 miles west of Baghdad, the capital of the volatile Anbar province.
The death came on the same day that 10 other U.S. troops were killed in four separate incidents in Iraq, a major blow on the same day a high-level panel in Washington recommended gradually shifting U.S. forces from a combat to a training role.
The military also released details about five of the other troops killed on Wednesday, saying they were Task Force Lightning soldiers who were struck by a roadside bomb while conducting combat operations in vicinity of the northern city of Kirkuk. The soldiers were assigned to 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division.
The U.S. military gave no further details about identities or the other deaths, pending notification of relatives.
"Our thoughts are with all 11 families who lost family members yesterday. Taking care of them right now is the military's highest priority," U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said.
The latest deaths raised to at least 31 the number of U.S. troops who have died this month. At least 69 troops were killed in November and 105 soldiers were killed in October — the highest amount for a month since January 2005.
At least 2,919 service members have been killed since the war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
In other developments:
A series of bombings and shootings killed at least 23 people in Iraq on Thursday, including a 7-year-old girl and two college professors. Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, director of the Interior Ministry's national command center, vowed to strike back at the spiraling sectarian violence in Baghdad, saying Iraqi forces will soon launch house-to-house searches to confiscate hidden weapons. "No house or area will be excluded from this search. All kinds of weapons will be confiscated," he told reporters, adding that 40 policemen were killed and 90 wounded in the capital in the last week.News of the first ten U.S. troop deaths came hours after a long-awaited report by a bipartisan blue ribbon panel in Washington called the situation in Iraq "grave and deteriorating." The report recommended new and enhanced diplomacy so that U.S. combat forces can "begin to move out of Iraq" as soon as that can be done responsibly.Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected the U.S. Iraq Study Group's linkage of instability in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Olmert said conditions were not ripe to reopen long-dormant talks with Syria and added that he received no indications from President Bush during a recent visit to Washington that the U.S. would push Israel to start such talks. A New Jersey mother is organizing a drive to send cans of Silly String to Iraq. American troops use it to detect trip wires around bombs, as Marcelle Shriver learned from her son, a soldier in Iraq. Iraqi envoys will visit Iran and four other neighboring countries "in the next few days" to discuss convening a regional conference on calming the violence here — but will not include Syria on the list, an aide to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Wednesday.