World

U.S. Airstrike Kills 17 In Iraq

September 2, 2004 / 12:19 PM EDT / CBS/AP

A U.S. airstrike on the volatile city of Fallujah late Wednesday killed 17 people, including three children, hospital officials and witnesses said. The U.S. military said the strike hit a reputed safehouse used by followers of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Witnesses said the strike hit a residential house in the southern neighborhood of al-Jubail. Residents scrambled to pull bodies, many disfigured from the blast, out of the rubble.

Ambulances and civilian cars transferred the dead and wounded to the hospital.

U.S. forces have repeatedly carried out airstrikes in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, since Marines pulled back after a three-week siege of the city in April aimed at rooting out Sunni Muslim insurgents.

The U.S. military said in a statement that the strike late Wednesday was a precision attack on a safehouse used by al-Zarqawi's militants.

The strike, based on multiple Iraqi and coalition intelligence sources, targeted two buildings used as safehouses and meeting points for al-Zarqawi associates who had executed someone earlier Wednesday, the military said.

"The Zarqawi associates were observed removing a man from the trunk of a car, executing him then burying his body," the military said.

Dr. Ahmed Hamid, of Fallujah General Hospital, said the bodies of nine civilians, including three children, had been brought to the hospital. An Associated Press reporter at the scene later saw eight more bodies pulled from the rubble.

Al-Zarqawi's followers have claimed responsibility for numerous deadly attacks across Iraq, including the beheadings of U.S. businessman Nicholas Berg and South Korean translator Kim Sun-il.

Fallujah is located about 40 miles west of Baghdad.

In other recent developments:

Gunmen opened fire on a convoy carrying former Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi in an apparent assassination attempt that wounded two of his bodyguards. Chalabi's convoy was attacked in southern Baghdad at about 7:30 a.m. as he returned from the holy city of Najaf, said spokesman Mithal al-Alusi.

Seven employees of a Kuwaiti trucking company who had been kidnapped in Iraq are free and headed to Kuwait, a company spokeswoman told The Associated Press Wednesday. The three Kenyans, three Indians and one Egyptian were abducted July 21. The kidnappers had repeatedly changed their demands and extended deadlines set for killing the seven.

Thousands of protesters ransacked a mosque and clashed with police in the Nepalese capital on Wednesday to protest the killing of 12 Nepalese hostages by Iraqi militants. "We want revenge," demonstrators shouted as they stormed the Jama mosque — the only Muslim house of worship in Katmandu. They broke windows and set fire to carpets, furniture and parts of the building, which was empty at the time.

In Baghdad, several mortar rounds exploded near the convention center where delegates to Iraq's new National Council met for the first time Wednesday inside the heavily guarded Green Zone, wounding one person, the U.S. military said.

In Mosul, gunmen shot and killed three Iraqi women who worked at a U.S. base in northern Iraq and a mortar barrage killed another civilian, police said. The three women were killed late Tuesday as they were returning home from the base in Mosul, said police 1st Lt. Ziyad Mahmoud Danoun. It was not immediately known what jobs they held there. A fourth woman in the vehicle escaped unharmed, Danoun said.