Fighting Swells in Insurgent Stronghold West of Baghdad

Heavy fighting surged Friday in the Euphrates River city of Ramadi, police and hospital officials said, and the U.S. military reported the deaths of two more soldiers around the militant stronghold west of Baghdad.

In the Iraqi capital, a suicide bomber on a public minibus set off an explosives belt as the vehicle approached a busy terminal, killing at least five people and wounding eight, police said.

Also in Baghdad, gunmen killed a member of the commission that keeps former officials in Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime out of the Iraqi government, police said. Thirteen members of the commission have been killed since it was created two years ago.

Seven of the 29 U.S. troops killed this month have died in or near Ramadi. The latest deaths occurred Thursday, one in a roadside bombing between Ramadi and nearby Fallouja, the other in a gun battle in Ramadi. Those slayings raised to at least 1,912 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003.

Ramadi police Capt. Nasir Alousi said American forces had airlifted equipment into the city stadium before dawn Friday. He said clashes had erupted in that area and spread to an industrial zone after sunrise, continuing until at least midday.

Omar Rawi, a doctor at Ramadi General Hospital, said two people had been killed and eight wounded in the fighting. Police Lt. Mohammed Tirbas Obaidi said a roadside bomb had destroyed a U.S. armored vehicle, but it was impossible to say whether there were casualties because U.S. forces had blocked the area.

Militants have used Ramadi as a stronghold since the start of the insurgency two years ago. The city of about 300,000 is the capital of Al Anbar province, which fans out west from Baghdad to the Saudi, Jordanian and Syrian borders. It includes much of the Sunni heartland, where residents lived a relatively privileged life under Hussein.

In Washington, the Pentagon said that about 9,400 active-duty U.S. troops in Iraq who are scheduled to finish one-year tours in January will be kept there an extra seven to 10 days.

Lawrence Di Rita, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said those troops would be held over so that a transition to the units replacing them would not begin during Iraqi elections scheduled for December.