| 73 Iraqis killed in bombings, as seven more US troops reported dead RAW STORY
Print This | Email This
"A string of suicide bombings killed at least 73 people and wounded dozens in Shiite villages north of Baghdad, including a large truck bombing Saturday that ripped through an outdoor market and buried victims in rubble," officials told AP Saturday.
"The quick succession of blasts within hours of each other suggested that Sunni militants are regrouping to launch their deadliest form of attack - suicide explosions, often against Shiites - in regions further away from Baghdad, beyond the edges of a three-week old U.S. offensive on the capital's northern flank," AP reported.
Lieutenant Colonel Hussein Ali Rasheed, deputy chief of police in the northern town of Tuz Khurmatu, said the blast had devastated the heart of Emerli, a small community from Iraq's Shiite Turkoman minority.
"There are around 40 wounded. Some of the houses collapsed on people, and more may be trapped inside," another officer, captain Nuzad Abdallah, told AFP.
Six more American soldiers have been killed in action over two days in Iraq and a seventh died outside battle, the US military said Saturday in a series of statements.
In Baghdad, three soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter were killed Friday in two roadside bomb attacks, one of them carried out with an Iranian-designed armour-piercing bomb. Six more soldiers were wounded.
Another soldier was killed on Thursday in a similar attack, and two marines were killed in western Iraq "while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province," the statement said.
On Saturday, a soldier assigned to the US command died "of a non battle related cause" which is under investigation.
These latest deaths bring the number of US military personnel to have died in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,597, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon statistics.
Iraq is in the grip of several overlapping conflicts between religious and political factions, but the suicide car bomb is a hallmark of Sunni extremists such as those affiliated with Al-Qaeda or Ansar al-Sunna.
With AFP.
Originally published on Saturday July 7, 2007.
|
