5 U.S. Soldiers and 12 Iraqis Killed

At least five U.S. soldiers and a dozen Iraqis were reported slain across Iraq as American and Iraqi troops continued their offensive Monday in the western town of Husaybah and insurgents targeted security forces and civilians.

Four U.S. soldiers were killed Monday when a suicide car bomber struck their vehicle at a checkpoint south of Baghdad. Another died Sunday when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb near Tikrit, northwest of Baghdad, the military announced.

In other violence, mortar shells struck a residential Baghdad neighborhood, killing five Iraqis and injuring six. A police convoy in the capital hit a roadside bomb, killing two and injuring two.

In northern Iraq, masked gunmen stormed an Internet cafe in Mosul and killed Ahmed Hussein Malaki, the editor of a weekly newspaper. A car bomb near Kirkuk killed four police officers guarding oil facilities.

Iraqi Army Brig. Gen. Hamid Shafiq narrowly escaped an assassination attempt near his Baghdad home, and an employee of the Sudanese Embassy was shot in the neck but drove himself to a hospital and survived.

In other developments, five members of a U.S. special forces regiment have been charged with abusing three detainees who allegedly were punched and kicked as they awaited incarceration, the U.S. military said in a statement. An investigation of the Sept. 7 incident led to the charges against the five soldiers, who belong to the 75th Ranger Regiment based at Ft. Benning, Ga.

Meanwhile, 2,500 U.S. military personnel backed by 1,000 Iraqi troops and American warplanes entered the third day of “Operation Steel Curtain,” a counter-insurgency operation in the Euphrates River valley town of Husaybah, allegedly a stronghold of violent Sunni Arab resistance to the U.S.-led military effort and Iraq’s transitional government, led by Shiites and Kurds.

Insurgents were launching sporadic attacks, sometimes from schools and mosques, the U.S. Marines said in a statement. The Marines promised that U.S. forces would exercise restraint and that “no airstrikes have been conducted against any mosques” during the operation.

Troops conducting house-to-house searches throughout the town found it largely emptied of civilians, who have fled to makeshift tent cities in the desert. Marines have discovered weapons caches, including homemade bombs, the statement said.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have staged numerous large-scale operations to root out insurgents from towns near the Syrian border. But because there is not enough U.S. and Iraqi government manpower to maintain a presence in such areas, insurgents frequently return once troops depart.

In the latest fighting, one Marine has been reported killed. A dozen U.S. soldiers and Marines have been treated at the U.S. Air Force Theater Hospital near Balad in central Iraq, according to the hospital commander, Col. Elisha T. Powell IV.

Black Hawk helicopters fly the wounded to the hospital, set up in a series of connecting tents surrounded by sandbags and concrete blast walls.

The number of U.S. casualties the hospital receives from the Euphrates River valley region, stretching from Baghdad northwest to the Syrian border, has increased in the last two weeks as U.S. forces have stepped up operations to close infiltration routes, Powell said. Several Iraqi army soldiers wounded in the fighting also have been treated at the facility.

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Daragahi reported from Baghdad and Zucchino from Logistics Support Area Anaconda near Balad. Special correspondents in Mosul and Kirkuk contributed to this report.