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thedrifter
11-02-05, 11:52 AM
war in iraq
Insurgents target troops, marketplace
By Thomas Wagner
The Associated Press
DenverPost.com

Baghdad, Iraq - Four U.S. troops were killed - two in a helicopter crash today and two from a roadside bomb - as American ground forces fought insurgents around the city of Ramadi, and a suicide car bomb south of Baghdad killed about 20 Iraqis.

The U.S. command said the AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter went down about 8:10 a.m. near Ramadi, killing the two Marines aboard.

The military said the cause of the crash was being investigated.

But Associated Press Television News quoted an Iraqi man who said he saw the crash and that insurgents "fired at the helicopter and shot it down." On Tuesday, a Marine and a sailor died in the city 70 miles west of Baghdad when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb, the U.S. command said.

The four U.S. deaths raised to 2,032 the number of members of the military who have died since the beginning of the war in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

At least 93 American service members died in October, making it the fourth-deadliest month for the troops in the war, and many were killed by homemade bombs that the Pentagon has said are becoming more powerful and technologically sophisticated.

The U.S. command said it is stepping up training for newly arrived officers to give them the latest tactics about protecting patrols from such bombs.

The evening suicide bombing in the Shiite-majority town of Musayyib, 40 miles south of Baghdad, also wounded 61 people. The attack heavily damaged an area with an outdoor market, a restaurant, a mosque and a bus station, said police Capt. Muthana Khalid.

The town suffered an even deadlier attack July 16, when a suicide bomber struck a gas station near the same mosque, blowing up a fuel tanker and killing nearly 100 people.

Today's blast appeared to target shoppers buying fruit and vegetables just before breaking their daily fast during Ramadan, a month of worship by Muslims.

The market was especially busy today because Eid al-Fitr, the three-day holiday that concludes Ramadan, is about to begin, and many families are buying food and desserts to serve to their families and friends.

"The insurgents wanted to cause as many casualties as possible," Khalid said, adding that all the victims appeared to be civilians. The toll was put at about 20 dead because of confusion in counting the bodies, he said.

The fighting in Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad, began Tuesday night when militants with guns, rockets and roadside bombs attacked U.S. patrols, said police Capt. Nassir al-Alousi.

APTN video from the city today showed a burning civilian vehicle and what appeared to be a wrecked U.S. Humvee. A crowd of Iraqis gathered at the site, and one man, waving the remnants of a damaged U.S. M-16 rifle in the air, said the attacks had caused U.S. casualties.

A U.S. warplane today dropped two 500-pound bombs on a suspected insurgent command center near where the Cobra had crashed. It was not know if anyone was hurt.

Also today, 11 Iraqis were killed and 23 wounded by a car bomb, three roadside bombs and seven drive-by shootings. Most of the violence occurred in the capital.

In the worst of those attacks, a roadside bomb aimed at a U.S.

military convoy south of Baghdad hit a minibus instead, killing five Iraqis, police said.

The bomb exploded at 7:30 a.m. on a two-lane highway in Jurf al Naddaf, a town just south of Baghdad, said police Lt. Col. Sabah Hussein. The minibus that was hit was traveling behind the American military patrol, and six Iraqis were wounded in addition to the five killed, he said.

The blast occurred in a section of Iraq known as the "triangle of death" because of frequent attacks by Sunni-led insurgents.

Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, confirmed the U.S. command will soon open a school for training officers at Taji, an air base 12 miles north of Baghdad.

The New York Times reported the school will instruct newly arrived Army and Marine officers in the latest tactics on finding and destroying roadside bombs and dealing with Iraq's many insurgent factions.

The Times said Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, had ordered the school's formation because of increasingly flexible and deadly attacks by insurgents.

Soldiers and Marines already receive some counterinsurgency instruction in the United States before leaving for Iraq, but the Times said some senior U.S. commanders have expressed concern that the instruction has been uneven and lags behind the fast-changing tactics that insurgents use in Iraq. The academy will give intensive one-week courses, the report said.

U.S. ground and air forces launched new attacks today near the Syrian border, destroying several insurgent "safe houses," killing a militant leader, and stopping an insurgent cell from planting roadside bombs near the town of Husaybah, the military said.

In Baghdad, the government announced that a raid Oct. 27 in Mosul killed four insurgents, including Abdul Sattar, identified as a key al-Qaeda in Iraq member leading militant operations there.

Mosul is 225 miles northwest of Baghdad.

The U.S. military said it captured two Yemeni fighters in the Iraqi capital Tuesday night who were on a reconnaissance mission and may have been planning car bomb attacks.

It also said its soldiers detained 12 suspected insurgents after a roadside bomb and small arms fire attack on coalition forces Tuesday in eastern Baghdad. Searching a nearby cement factory, U.S. and Iraqi forces found more than 65 AK-47 rifles, 120 AK-47 magazines, three machine guns and three ammunition drums, the military said.

Ellie