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-- U.S. Marines Push Toward Syrian Border
U.S. Marines Push Toward Syrian Border
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| U.S. Marines Push Toward Syrian Border By ANTONIO CASTANEDA, Associated Press Writer 34 minutes ago Hundreds of U.S. Marines pushed through a lawless region on the Syrian frontier Tuesday after battling past well-armed militants fighting from basements, rooftops and sandbag bunkers. Insurgents kidnapped the provincial governor as a bargaining chip. As many as 100 insurgents were killed in the first 48 hours of Operation Matador, as American troops cleared villages along the meandering Euphrates then crossed in rafts and on a pontoon bridge, the U.S. command said. Many of the dead remained trapped under rubble after attack planes and helicopter gunships pounded their hideouts. At least three Marines were reported killed and 20 wounded during the first three days of the offensive � the biggest U.S. operation since Fallujah was taken from extremists six months ago. The operation was launched after U.S. intelligence showed followers of Iraq's most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, took refuge in the remote desert region � a haven for smugglers and insurgent suppliers. The fighters were believed to have fled to Anbar Province after losses in Iraqi cities. After intense fighting with militants entrenched on the south bank of the Euphrates River early in the operation, Marines saw only light resistance Tuesday and advanced through sparsely populated settlements along a 12-mile stretch to the border with Syria, according to a Chicago Tribune reporter embedded with the assault, James Janega. Gunmen kidnapped Anbar's governor Tuesday morning and told his family he would be released only when U.S. forces withdrew from Qaim, the town 200 miles west of Baghdad where the offensive began late Saturday. Gov. Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi was seized as he drove from Qaim to the provincial capital of Ramadi, his brother, Hammad, told The Associated Press. Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, said: "We don't respond to insurgent or terrorist demands." At least three Marines were reported killed and 20 wounded during the first three days of Operation Matador. The U.S. command said as many as 100 insurgents died in the first 48 hours � many of them trapped under rubble as attack planes and helicopter gunships pounded their hideouts. At the Pentagon, Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday that the assault in the northern Jazirah Desert had run into well-equipped and trained fighters. "There are reports that these people are in uniforms, in some cases are wearing protective vests, and there's some suspicion that their training exceeds what we have seen with other engagements further east," he said. Marine commanders in the field told The Chicago Tribune that militants put up an unexpectedly intense fight in villages dotting the Euphrates as it snakes across the desert toward the Syrian border. As troops erected a pontoon bridge Sunday, mortar fire began to fall on them from the nearby town of Obeidi, 185 miles west of Baghdad, the Tribune said. Navy and Marine F/A-18 Hornet strike jets strafed the tree line and Marine Cobra attack helicopters fired rockets into insurgent hideouts, the Tribune said. When Marines entered the town Sunday, they found insurgents prepared for battle. Sandbag bunkers stood in front of some houses, and other gunmen fired from rooftops and balconies, according to a Los Angeles Times reporter also embedded with the troops. As fighting continued into Monday, the insurgents used boats to ferry weapons across the river. At one point, the paper said, a Marine walked into a house and a fighter hiding in the basement fired through a floor grate, killing him. Another Marine suffered shrapnel wounds when an insurgent threw a grenade through the window of a house where he was retrieving a wounded comrade, the Times said. Insurgents attacked a Marine convoy late Monday near a U.S. base in Qaim with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, roadside bombs and two suicide car bombs, a Marine spokesman, Capt. Jeffrey Pool, said. One explosion damaged a Humvee, and a suicide car bomber was destroyed by a Marine tank. No Marines were killed and 10 insurgents surrendered in the incident, Pool said. Residents reached by telephone in the area reported some fighting Tuesday in Obeidi and the two nearby towns of Rommana and Karabilah. They said frightened residents were taking advantage of the relative lull to flee the Qaim area. Adel Izzedine left on foot with his wife and three children, walking six miles through farm fields to reach a village where the family caught a taxi and drove 43 miles to Rawa, east of the fighting. "There are gunmen in the city, but there are also a lot of innocent civilians," said Izzedine, who was looking for a mosque or a school in which to spend the night. "We are living the same misery that Fallujah lived some time ago." Intelligence reports indicated insurgents were using the region, a known smuggling route, as a staging area where foreign fighters cross into Iraq from Syria and receive weapons and equipment for attacks in Baghdad, Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul and other cities, Pool said. Syria has said it is arresting would-be infiltrators and doing what it can to control the border with Iraq. The U.S. offensive comes amid a surge of militant attacks that have targeted the U.S. military and Iraqi security forces and civilians, since the country's first democratically elected government was announced April 28. At least two car bombs exploded Tuesday in downtown Baghdad, targeting U.S. and Iraqi troops. At least nine Iraqis were killed and 19 wounded, the Interior Ministry said. One of the bombs wounded three American soldiers, a U.S. military spokeswoman, Capt. Kelly Lewis, said. Also Tuesday, Iraq's parliament appointed a 55-member committee of legislators from the country's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish groups to draft a new constitution. Political leaders spent the first three months after landmark Jan. 30 elections forming a government and now have until Aug. 15 to complete the charter, which would then be voted on in a national referendum. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050510/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq |
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| Iraqi Insurgents Go on Rampage, Kill 60 By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 43 minutes ago A string of bombings, including one by a man with explosives strapped to his body, struck several Iraqi cities Wednesday, killing more than 60 people and wounding more than 100. Meanwhile, a U.S. offensive in the lawless region near the Syrian frontier aimed at followers of Iraq's most-wanted terrorist entered its fourth day, the military said, adding that evidence obtained from captured insurgents confirmed the presence of foreign fighters in the area. The operation came amid a surge of deadly car bombings, ambushes and other attacks after Iraq's first democratically elected government was announced April 28. Insurgents are averaging about 70 attacks a day this month, up from 30-40 in February and March, said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq. In Hawija, 150 miles north of Baghdad, a man with hidden explosives slipped past security guards protecting a police and army recruitment center on Wednesday and blew himself up just outside the building where some 150 applicants were lined up. At least 30 people were killed and 35 injured, police said. "I was standing near the center and all of a sudden it turned into a scene of dead bodies and pools of blood," police Sgt. Khalaf Abbas said by cell phone from the chaotic scene. "Windows were blown out in nearby houses, leaving the street covered with glass." In Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, a suicide car bomb exploded in a small market near a police station, killing at least 27 people and wounding 75, police and hospital officials said. The attacker swerved into a crowd after heavy security prevented him from reaching the police station, police said. The Ansar al-Sunnah Army said on its Web site Wednesday that it was behind the blast. But it denied the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber and that it targeted a local market, saying instead it was aimed at Iraqis who work in the U.S. base in Tikrit. The statement, which could not be authenticated, claimed its fighters left a booby-trapped car at a "site where dozens of renegades who work in an American base pass." Four more car bombs exploded in Baghdad, three of them in suicide attacks, the U.S. military said. One caused an unspecified number of casualties in a U.S. patrol, it said. Iraqi police confirmed three attacks targeting a police station and patrols in Baghdad. Four Iraqis were killed and 14 wounded, including at least three policeman, they said. Another bomb exploded at Iraq's largest fertilizer plant in the southern city of Basra, setting fire to a gas pipeline and destroying about 60 percent of the plant. One person was killed and 23 wounded in the blast, police and employees said. In Brazil, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, on his first foreign trip since being elected to head the interim government, appealed to South American nations to support his country's efforts to defeat its insurgency. "Terrorism is not limited to Iraq, it is a global curse," Talabani said, addressing heads of state and ministers gathered for the first summit of South American and Arab countries. Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari also suggested that some of Iraq's neighbors have become unnerved by the American-backed attempt to establish a democratic government in Baghdad and still are not doing enough to stop militants from trying to undermine the newly elected government. He singled out Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey. "There is some tolerance for these terror networks on the part of the neighboring countries," Zebari told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday on the sidelines of the summit in Brazil. Operation Matador, which began around midnight on Saturday, continued Wednesday with U.S. Marines conducting combat operations near the Syrian border, said U.S. military spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool. He provided no details of the day's fighting. The offensive was launched after U.S. intelligence showed that followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had taken refuge in the desert border region � believed to be a haven for smugglers and foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria. Many of the insurgents were believed to have fled to remote parts of Anbar province after losses in Fallujah and Ramadi, farther east. As many as 100 insurgents were killed in the first 48 hours of the offensive as U.S. troops cleared villages along the southern banks of the meandering Euphrates River, then crossed in rafts and on a pontoon bridge, the U.S. command said. Many of the dead remained trapped under rubble after attack planes and helicopter gunships pounded their hideouts. An unspecified number of insurgents were also detained during the operation, Pool said in a statement. "Information gathered prior to the operation about the presence of foreign fighters in the region has been confirmed by clothing, identification, dialect and by admissions from the detainees," he added. At least three Marines were reported killed and 20 wounded in the first four days of the offensive � the biggest U.S. operation since Fallujah was taken from militants six months ago. Two civilians � a woman and a child � were killed Tuesday at a U.S. checkpoint southeast of Obeidi, the border town 200 miles west of Baghdad that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the offensive, the military said. Pool said Marines fired at their vehicle after it ignored repeated warnings to stop. The driver jumped out of the moving car and fled, leaving the vehicle and its passengers to continue toward the checkpoint, Pool said. The driver was apprehended and held for questioning. The Marines said they believed the vehicle was a suicide car bomb, the statement said. East of Husaybah, a town about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad, Marine AH-1W Super Cobra helicopters shot and killed three armed men seen digging holes Tuesday in a road in which to place explosives, Pool said. Late that night, in the same town, Marines shot and killed four insurgents armed with AK-47 automatic rifles, he said. After intense fighting with militants entrenched on the south bank of the Euphrates River early in the operation, Marines saw only light resistance Tuesday and advanced through sparsely populated settlements along a 12-mile stretch toward the border, said James Janega, a Chicago Tribune reporter embedded with the assault. Gunmen kidnapped the governor of Anbar province Tuesday and told his family he would be released only when U.S. forces withdrew from Qaim, the town 200 miles west of Baghdad where the offensive began Saturday. Gov. Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi was seized as he drove from Qaim to the provincial capital of Ramadi, his brother, Hammad, told AP. His brother said Wednesday that the kidnappers were offering to release the governor in exchange for three al-Zarqawi followers captured by U.S. forces in Qaim. He did not identify the insurgents in question. Qaim residents reached by telephone Wednesday said the town was calm and a few shops were open. But fighting continued nearby. "We are hearing explosions of shells," said one resident, Ahmed al-Ani. At the Pentagon, Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the assault in the northern Jazirah Desert had run into well-equipped and trained fighters. "There are reports that these people are in uniforms, in some cases are wearing protective vests, and there's some suspicion that their training exceeds what we have seen with other engagements further east," he said. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050511/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq |
Yay! Invade Syria
Nah. Lets get Blair to do it. 
The articles don't seem to imply any direct Syrian involvement in the insurgency (or that US troops are actually fighting in Syrian territory) rather that the fight is occurring close to the Syrian border in north-western Iraq which, I believe, is a pretty desolate place and which must be pretty damn close to (if not within) the so-called "Sunni triangle". Sounds like a pretty logical place for insugents to hide-out to be honest.
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| Originally posted by Yoepus Yay! Invade Syria |
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| Originally posted by josh4 Nah. Lets get Blair to do it. |
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| Originally posted by Renegade Whatever happens, you can bet that Australia, under the current government, will be right there tagging along... |
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| Originally posted by occrider Yay! More ANZAC holidays!!! |
)
Plugging the hole where outsiders are streaming into Iraq to bring harm on the government and US troops seems the common sense thing to do. Can't understand why it wasn't done earlier...
[[[smoke]]]
right now there are a lot of holes in Iraq that need plugging
Plugging holes = killing bad guys, so I'd say let's let the games begin.
[[[smoke]]]
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| Originally posted by smokeape Plugging the hole where outsiders are streaming into Iraq to bring harm on the government and US troops seems the common sense thing to do. Can't understand why it wasn't done earlier... [[[smoke]]] |
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| Originally posted by smokeape Plugging the hole where outsiders are streaming into Iraq to bring harm on the government and US troops seems the common sense thing to do. Can't understand why it wasn't done earlier... [[[smoke]]] |
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| Originally posted by donegalredneck Outsiders coming into Iraq to oust the Americans seems like common sense thing to do. More power to them! |
The nationality of the people upholding the puppet government in Iraq doesn't really matter. Imperialists or collaborators, all the same.
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| Originally posted by donegalredneck The nationality of the people upholding the puppet government in Iraq doesn't really matter. Imperialists or collaborators, all the same. |
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