U.S. forces killed 27 Iraqi fighters in a ground and air pursuit Friday after the Iraqis attacked an American tank patrol north of Baghdad, the military said, according to AP.
The fighting came as U.S. forces pressed forward with a massive, four-day-old sweep to crush resistance.
U.S. Central Command said an "organized group" ambushed the tanks with rocket propelled grenades in Balad, about 55 kilometers from the capital on the main highway north.
The patrol returned fire and killed four of the assailants in the initial gunbattle, the military said.
When the rest of the attackers fled, Apache helicopters joined the chase along with tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, killing 23 more assailants.
Earlier, U.S. occupation forces in Iraq have raided areas said to contain pockets of resistance, killing 70, among them foreign fighters, in an attack on what they called a "terrorist camp northwest of Baghdad, U.S. military officials and news agencies said Friday.
US authorities were planning Friday morning to interrogate the lone survivor of the raid. In addition to the 70 combatants that were killed, a large cache of weapons was seized in the heavy engagement. "This is real warfare going on here," one of the officials was quoted as saying. "This was a major combat operation."
NBC News' reported that US airplanes dropped six precision-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition weapons, or JDAMs, in the attack on at al-Asad camp.
U.S. ground troops confiscated a sizeable cache of weapons, including at least three dozen shoulder-fired SAM 7 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as rocket-propelled grenades and mortars, the officials said. (Albawaba.com)
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