New U.S. Raid in West Iraq

U.S. Marines launched a major offensive Saturday near Iraq’s western border aimed at disrupting an important conduit for insurgents thought to be filtering into the country from Syria and slowing attacks before the Oct. 15 referendum on a new constitution.

About 1,000 troops stormed into the village of Sadah early Saturday in armored Humvees and tanks. At least 10 people were killed in fire from helicopter gunships, said a doctor at the hospital in the nearby town of Qaim.

As U.S. forces battled on Iraq’s western border, insurgent attacks across the nation killed 13 people: two American service members, a Danish soldier, three Iraqi soldiers, four Iraqi policemen and three civilians.

Operation Iron Fist is the fourth sweep this year in Al Anbar province, a wide swath of territory west of Baghdad that has been a main staging ground for attacks throughout Iraq.

Al Anbar, with its thousands of square miles of desert, is a mostly barren tribal homeland where even ousted dictator Saddam Hussein failed to suppress armed movements. Insurgents shuttle between dozens of tiny villages and larger cities such as Qaim and Haditha, where Marines are routinely attacked with mortar rounds, roadside bombs and sniper fire.

Military leaders have acknowledged that such sweeps are unlikely to quash the insurgency completely. Marines have killed hundreds of insurgents in earlier operations and driven them out of several towns, but as soon as U.S. forces withdraw, armed elements return within days.

In Washington last week, U.S. military leaders said that reducing troop levels would push Iraqi forces toward self-reliance. President Bush, in his weekly radio broadcast Saturday, spoke of the “increasing size and capability” of Iraqi forces.

But Iraqis are not part of the new campaign, said an official with Iraq’s Interior Ministry.

“We don’t have any security presence anywhere past Hit,” a town about halfway between Baghdad and the site of the current offensive, the official said. “Insurgents target Iraqi soldiers out there, so the operations were conducted only by American forces, without the aid of Iraqi national guards or police or any other Iraqi security forces.”

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to reporters.

Meanwhile, insurgents in Baghdad kidnapped the brother of Interior Minister Bayan Jabr. And in the northern city of Taji, gunmen abducted Firas Marid, the son of a brigadier general who works in the ministry’s tribal affairs bureau.

Last month, as U.S. and Iraqi troops staged a much larger joint operation in the northern city of Tall Afar, one insurgent group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, offered to pay a reward for the assassination of several of Iraq’s top leaders, including the interior minister, who is a Shiite.

The U.S. offensive in Al Anbar comes two weeks before the constitutional referendum that U.S. and Iraqi leaders hope will stabilize the country and slow insurgent violence.

But some Iraqis are worried that the operations will have the opposite effect.

“Everybody is working to exclude Sunni Arab areas from voting in the referendum and the December elections,” said Sheik Khalaf Aliyan, a provincial tribal leader and member of the constitutional drafting committee. “How can these people vote while they are scattered across the desert and their homes destroyed?”

Only 81,000 of the more than 900,000 people in Al Anbar have registered to vote in the referendum, Iraqi government officials said.

Many Iraqis are convinced that the constitution will pass, but Sunni Arabs and some others say that it will lack the credibility to appease violent sectarian movements.

Sunni Arab leaders, who are unhappy with some provisions in the document, met Friday with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. They proposed last-minute changes that would prevent Shiites in the south and Kurds in northern Iraq from seceding. The proposed revision would place oil fields in the north and south under the management of the central government instead of Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated provincial governments.

Shiite and Kurdish leaders have consistently rejected such proposals.

Times wire services were used in compiling this report.