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10.08.05, 23:49
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August 10, 2005
Insurgents in Iraq Kill 4 Soldiers and Wound 6 Others
By KIRK SEMPLE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 10 - The American military announced today that four
soldiers under the command of a New York-based Army National Guard division
were killed on Tuesday and six other people were wounded when insurgents
attacked a patrol near Baiji, a town in northern Iraq.
The American command also disclosed that another soldier had been killed on
Tuesday by small-arms fire in a 1,000-soldier sweep of the Euphrates River
corridor in western Anbar Province, a redoubt for the insurgency.
Five of the six who were wounded near Baiji were soldiers and the sixth was
an American military contractor, a military spokesman said.
The announcements came as the leaders of Iraq's political blocs met for a
third time in Baghdad in an attempt to work through impasses that have
stymied a committee mandated to draft a new constitution. But with only five
days to go before the constitution's deadline, none of the most contentious
issues - including the role of Islam in legislation, the future of the oil-
rich city of Kirkuk and the degree of power that should be accorded to
regional authorities - were settled, officials said.
The American patrol in Baiji, an oil refining town, was struck by a large
roadside bomb while the soldiers were investigating an earlier explosion in
the area, said Sgt. First Class David Rhodes, a spokesman for the 42nd
Infantry Division. The division is based in Troy, N.Y., and has been
overseeing security in four northern provinces since February.
As the able-bodied soldiers tended to the casualties, the patrol came under
attack by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, the spokesman said.
The contractor wounded in the attack was a dog handler, he added; dogs are
often used by the military to detect explosives.
Military officials declined to disclose the identities of the casualties or
whether the soldiers were members of the 42nd Infantry Division, known as
the "Rainbow Division," which is based in New York and includes soldiers from
more than 10 states. In Iraq, the division's commander, Maj. Gen. Joseph J.
Taluto, is leading Task Force Liberty, which is composed of about 23,000
troops drawn from an assortment of National Guard, Army Reserve and active
duty units.
The incident was reminiscent of an attack last week when 14 marines died when
their amphibious armored vehicle hit a buried stack of land mines near
Haditha, in Anbar Province.
In the Iraqi capital, a suicide car bomber blew himself up next to a patrol
of Iraqi police officers in the western suburb of Ghazaliya, killing six
people, including two police officers and four civilians, an Interior
Ministry official reported. Two other police officers and 14 civilians were
wounded in the attack, the official said.
The leaders of the country's political blocs met today for the third day of a
summit to discuss the constitution; the National Assembly has given itself an
Aug. 15 deadline to approve a draft. The document is supposed to be submitted
for a national referendum in mid-October. A spokesman for President Jalal
Talabani, who attended the meeting, said the participants wrestled with
several of the most intractable issues today, including federalism, the
distribution of oil revenues and the electoral system.
The spokesman, Kamraan Qaradaghi, also said that the roster of participants
had widened to include several political groups that represent Sunni Arabs
but have no representation in the National Assembly, including the Sunni
Endowment, the Iraqi Islamic Party and the National Dialogue Council. The
Bush administration has been pushing the Shiite-dominated government to
incorporate more Sunni Arabs into the political process in the hope that
greater inclusiveness will give more legitimacy to the constitution and
defuse the Sunni-led insurgency.
At a separate news conference, three members of the National Assembly's
constitutional committee said the drafters were still discussing essential
authorities of the constitution, including whether to form a constitutional
court and how much flexibility to provide for the passage of amendments. The
Kurdish demand for a referendum on the governance of Kirkuk also remained an
open and heavily debated question, they said.
In a window on the intricacies and nuances of the discussions, Ali Adeeb, a
Shiite member of the committee, pointed to the dizzying array of questions
surrounding the definition of federalism and the sort of provincial
authorities that may be created. "Is it a national or geographic or a
historical federalism?" he said with some degree of exasperation. "Is it
applied all over Iraq? How many will we make? And we're still discovering the
meaning of `region.' Is it one province or two? And how do we join two
provinces?"
In other violence today, insurgents fired a mortar round into Antar Square in
the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Adamiya in northern Baghdad, the
ministry official said. The explosion killed a traffic policeman and wounded
seven other people, the official reported.
The Iraqi Ministry of Defense announced that security forces had discovered
and defused a suicide car bomb in the affluent Mansur neighborhood of
Baghdad. The car was rigged with five 155-millimeter artillery rounds and
five antitank mines, the ministry said.
The American military also announced the conclusion of a weeklong offensive
in the Euphrates River corridor in Anbar Province, where insurgents had been
attacking American-led coalition forces. The start of the mission early last
week came amid a series of sharp attacks in the region against American
forces, including two ambushes that killed 20 marines. The offensive was only
the latest in a series of such attempts by the American command to choke off
insurgent strongholds and supply routes along a corridor that runs from the
Syrian border to Baghdad.
But like other similar missions, the latest operation appeared to have
underwhelming results. According to the final scorecard posted by the
military today, soldiers discovered nine vehicle car bombs, six of which were
found in a garage used for rigging such weapons, and 28 improvised bombs
planted on the side of roads or near buildings. The sweep also netted 36
suspected insurgents, who have been detained for questioning, the military
said.
In a statement, Col. Stephen W. Davis, commanding officer of the Marine's
Regimental Combat Team-2, said the operation "disrupted the insurgents'
ability to operate freely" in western Anbar.
But if past experience is any measure, the disruption may be only temporary.
Military officials seemed to be acknowledging as much earlier this week,
saying that the insurgency had evaporated in advance of the American-Iraqi
offensive. And in the past, once the military has completed a sweep and
returned to its bases, the insurgency has resurfaced in the same place - at
best hobbled, but far from vanquished.
Dexter Filkins, Khalid al-Ansary and Kirk Semple contributed reporting from
Baghdad for this article, and David S. Cloud from Washington.
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