Fierce fighting between occupation forces and gunmen shut down an Iraqi city on Wednesday.
Gunfire crackled for most of the morning around Baghdad's Green Zone, the site of U.S. and Iraqi government offices. By 10 a.m., 13 gunmen, six policemen, and five civilians had been killed in Iraq, including two females who were caught up in a US raid north of the capital, police and U.S. officials said. That raised to seven the number of Iraqi females, including an infant, who had died during American raids in Iraq in the last two days.
Occupation forces backed by U.S. aircraft killed eight al-Qaeda in Iraq members during a raid near Baqouba that also left two Iraqi women dead, the U.S. military said.
Also Wednesday, gunmen attacked the police headquarters in downtown Baqouba, and five of the attackers were shot and killed, police said.
Elsewhere, a roadside bomb killed one U.S. soldier and injured another in northern Iraq, the military said Wednesday.
Tuesday
American troops fought with gunmen using a building as a safe house in Ramadi on Tuesday, killing one Iraqi man and five females, ranging in age from an infant to teenagers, the U.S. military said.
The bloodshed came on a day that saw sectarian violence kill 10 other Iraqis and injure some 50, police said. The bodies of 50 torture victims were also discovered, most of them in Baghdad and the city of Baqouba to the north, police said. Several of the corpses had been dumped at a bus station or outside a government building.
According to the AP, the battle in Ramadi started when a U.S. patrol discovered a roadside bomb in the Hamaniyah section of the city, and two suspects fled to a house, where they took up positions on the roof, the US military said. The gunmen fired on the soldiers, who fought back with machine guns and tanks, the statement said.
Afterward, US forces searched the house and found the six bodies, ranging in age from an infant to teenagers, the military said. Another female was wounded but refused treatment, it said.
Meanwhile, a U.S. Marine died Monday in another area of Anbar province, the military said, raising to at least 2,881 the number of members of the American military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
In another development, videotape footage appears to show the wreckage of a U.S. single-seat F-16CG jet in the farm field where it crashed Monday and the remains of an American serviceman with a tangled parachute nearby.
U.S. forces investigating the crash said gunmen had reached the site before American forces and the pilot is missing. Al-Jazeera satellite television broadcast similar pictures Monday, but declined to show the dead pilot, saying the footage was too graphic to air. The U.S. Air Force jet crashed about 20 miles northwest of Baghdad.
