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US military launches new Iraq offensive
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-04 22:18
Some 2,500 U.S. troops along with Iraqi forces launched their second major
offensive in western Iraq in a week Tuesday, sweeping into three towns to take
them back from insurgents who had killed Marines there last month.
The U.S. military announced its first casualties of the offensives, with four
troops killed by roadside bombs during the fighting and a fifth elsewhere.
The assaults in western Iraq aim to put down al-Qaida in Iraq and other
Sunni-led insurgent groups that have waged a campaign of violence aimed at
wrecking a crucial Oct. 15 national vote on a new constitution. The United
States has hoped the new charter would bring together the country's fractious
communities, but Sunnis sharply oppose it.
Sunni Arab moderates threatened Tuesday to boycott the voting after the
Shiite-led parliament passed new rules over the weekend that make it effectively
impossible for Sunnis to defeat the charter at the ballot box.
The new rules deepened alienation over the political process among Sunnis,
who had decided to participate in the referendum but to vote no — but who now
said the Shiites were using their dominance to stack the deck against them. A
boycott would undermine the referendum's legitimacy and strike a blow to hopes
that political progress would weaken Sunni support for the insurgency.
"Boycotting the referendum is a possible option ... because we believe that
participating in the voting might be a useless act," said Saleh al-Mutlaq, a
leading Sunni politician.
In Baghdad, a suicide attacker set off a car bomb at the main entrance to the
heavily fortified Green Zone, a district of Iraqi government buildings and the
U.S. and British Embassies. The powerful blast killed two policemen.
The attack came on the first day of Ramadan, the holy Islamic month of
fasting. Al-Qaida in Iraq called on its followers to step up attacks against
U.S. and Iraqi forces and make it a "month of victory for Muslims and a month of
defeat for the hypocrites and polytheists."
Previous Ramadans since the invasion and occupation of Iraq two years ago saw
a spike in violence in Iraq — especially suicide attacks, in part because some
Islamic extremists believe those who die in combat for a holy cause during the
period are especially blessed.
In another statement, al-Qaida in Iraq urged Sunnis to boycott the
referendum, saying U.S. authorities would fix the vote. "You know very well that
the Americans are going to supervise collecting the voting boxes and counting
the votes," it said.
The military launched its latest offensive in a cluster of cities in the
Euphrates River valley about 140 miles northwest of Baghdad. Code-named "River
Gate," it was the largest U.S. offensive in the troubled Anbar region of western
Iraq this year, the military said. It also included hundreds of Iraqi troops,
the largest such contingent of any of the offensives this year.
Airstrikes by U.S. warplanes and dozens of helicopters set off explosions
that lit up Haqlaniyah, Parwana and Haditha before dawn Tuesday. Barrages of
gunfire also were seen in the night sky. Large sections of Haqlaniyah's power
were knocked out.
Some of the strikes took out bridges across the Euphrates in the area to
prevent militants from escaping over them into the desert, said Lt. Col.
Christopher Starling, the operations officer in Regimental Combat Team 2, which
is leading the offensive.
Dozens of roadside bombs were encountered on the main arteries into the towns
as U.S. troops moved in, Marine commanders said. Later in the day, U.S. snipers
took positions on rooftops in Haqlaniyah as troops blared warnings on
loudspeakers ordering residents to stay inside their homes, witnesses said.
The military launched a similar offensive on Saturday, 93 miles upriver, by
the Syrian border. Operation "Iron Fist," which continued Tuesday, concentrated
in the towns of Sadah, Karabilah and Rumana, aiming to uproot al-Qaida in Iraq
insurgents who receive reinforcements and supplies from inside Syria. At least
57 militants have been killed in that operation.
The military said a Marine was killed Monday by a roadside bomb in Karabilah,
the first U.S. death in Operation Iron Fist. In the hours before Operation River
Gate began, a roadside bomb hit U.S. troops in Haqlaniyah on Monday, killing
three, the military said.
Elsewhere, a soldier was shot Monday morning near Taqaddum, a town close to
the city of Fallujah, also in Anbar but away from the two offensives, the
military said.
The killings raised to at least 1,941 the number of U.S. military members who
have died since the beginning of the war in 2003, according to an Associated
Press count.
The towns of Haqlaniyah, Parwana and Haditha, with a combined population of
100,000, have no Iraqi police or troops based in them, leaving their streets
open to roving insurgent groups.
On Aug. 1, an ambush by insurgents in Haditha killed six U.S. Marine snipers,
and a large roadside bomb on the outskirts of the city on Aug. 3 killed 14
Marines and an Iraqi interpreter.
Last spring, Haditha General Hospital, the region's largest, was heavily
damaged by a suicide car bomb that set fire to the building, and insurgents used
staff and patients as human shields during fighting with Marines that followed.
In addition, the U.S. military has said that Iraq's most wanted terrorist,
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al-Qaida in Iraq, once had a home in Haditha.
Earlier this year, hundreds of U.S. forces conducted individual sweeps in the
three towns.
The newest operation is "step forward to eliminating insurgents and giving
the country back to the Iraqi people," said Col. Stephen W. Davis, who added it
would help residents in the Haditha area freely vote in the constitutional
referendum.
On Monday, the United Nations announced in New York that it is distributing
millions of copies of the draft constitution in this country ahead of the
referendum. But residents in Baghdad and several other provinces told the AP on
Tuesday that they have not received the document or seen it being handed out in
their areas.
Under referendum rules, the constitution is defeated if two-thirds of voters
in any 13 of Iraq's 18 provinces vote "no." Leaders of the country's Sunni Arab
minority — which holds majorities in four provinces — were hoping to use that to
knock down a draft charter they say will tear Iraq into Shiite, Kurdish and
Sunni fragments, leaving the Sunnis the weakest.
But the Shiite-led parliament ruled Sunday that two-thirds of registered
voters must vote "no" — not two-thirds of those who cast ballots, making it
nearly impossible for Sunnis to reach that mark.
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