The U.S. Army confirmed six soldiers died ed in two bombings Monday. In one attack, four soldiers were killed when their patrol hit a roadside bomb in Youssifiyah, 12 miles south of Baghdad, the military said.
A similar bomb hit a patrol near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, killing two soldiers from the 29th Brigade Combat Team. The US military also announced a Marine had been killed in a blast near Falluja on Sunday.
In two separate mortar attacks in Baghdad and northern Iraq killed three people and injured 11. A car bomb and two drive-by shootings in Baghdad killed a construction contractor and wounded six people, police said, according to the AP.
Elsewhere, American warplanes bombed a house near the Syrian border before dawn on Monday in what the US Army said was a "precision strike" on an al Qaeda leader. However, a local hospital doctor in the town of Qaem reported that 40 people died and 20 injured, many of them women and children. Rescuers were still trying to remove bodies from the rubble, he added.
A local tribal leader told Reuters there were no armed groups in the area.
On his part, an American spokesman confirmed the bombing took place in Karabila, close to Qaem. "A senior al Qaeda cell leader was the target of the strike," he stated.
