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Three U.S. troops still missing
in Iraq
Federal officials say help from American
public and informants is necessary to quell domestic terrorism
Reuters
Sunday May 13, 2007
The U.S. military was searching on Sunday for three American soldiers
who went missing in an al Qaeda stronghold near Baghdad after a
raid killed five members of a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol.
North of the capital, a truck bomb near the office of a leading
Kurdish political party killed at least 30 people and wounded 50
in the town of Makhmour. It came four days after a truck bomb killed
at least 15 people in the nearby city of Arbil, capital of the autonomous
Iraqi region of Kurdistan.
The patrol of seven U.S. soldiers and one Iraqi army interpreter
were ambushed in a rural area south of Baghdad known as the Sunni
"Triangle of Death" -- the same area where two U.S. soldiers
were abducted by al Qaeda insurgents last year before their mutilated
bodies were found.
"We can establish now the identity of three of the American
soldiers who were killed and the one Iraqi Army interpreter that
was killed. So the identification of four of the five is now complete
and the fifth one is still ongoing," Major-General William
Caldwell, chief military spokesman, said.
"We will make every effort available to find our three missing
soldiers," Caldwell told a news conference.
U.S.-led troops backed by helicopters and jets combed orchards,
searched farms and threw up roadblocks in a massive hunt for the
missing soldiers west of the town of Mahmudiya.
Residents said the patrol was ambushed by insurgents after it struck
a roadside bomb on a rural road in an area of palm groves called
Shibaiya, near the town of Yusufiya.
"We saw smoke rise from the area. Three vehicles were on fire
and a fourth one had fallen into a canal," said a farmer.
"U.S. forces cordoned off the area and made arrests,"
the farmer told Reuters as U.S. helicopters hovered overhead.
The mayor of Mahmudiya, Muayed al-Ameri, also said the patrol had
been ambushed.
Last June, al Qaeda gunmen snatched two U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint
in Yusufiya. Their mutilated and booby-trapped bodies were found
days later after a search by thousands of troops.
Some 30,000 additional U.S. troops are being deployed in Baghdad
in what is seen as a final push to halt a slide into all-out civil
war between majority Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs.
The three-month-old plan is also aimed at securing areas outside
Baghdad from where Sunni Arab militants are staging attacks against
Shi'ites in the capital and elsewhere.
Colonel Abdul Qadir al Harky said the bomb in Makhmour in the north
of Iraq went off in an area with several government offices and
there were many bodies under the rubble.
Other security sources said the KDP was having a local meeting
at the time of the attack. The KDP is the party of Massoud Barzani,
leader of the autonomous Kurdish region.
The attack near the Kurdish interior ministry in Arbil last week,
which was claimed by al Qaeda, raised fears among ethnic Kurds that
their relatively peaceful region would become a target of more violence
to come.
(Additional reporting by Shamal Aqrawi in Arbil)
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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