4 U.S. Troops Die on Iraq’s Major Battle Fronts

Violence claimed the lives of three U.S. servicemen in Fallouja and one in Baghdad, the U.S. military announced Monday.

The deaths highlighted Iraq’s two main battlegrounds: Al Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency, and the capital, where U.S. and Iraqi troops are conducting a crackdown on sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslim extremists.

Two Marines and a sailor who were wounded in Fallouja on Sunday later died, the military announced. The city in western Iraq, site of two major U.S. operations in 2004, has long been a troublesome area for American forces. Despite efforts to restrict their movements in and out of the city, insurgents have continued to stage attacks against U.S. forces stationed there.

This month, hundreds of fresh Iraqi police recruits avoided work in Fallouja after guerrillas threatened police forces and killed nine officers.

In Baghdad, a roadside bomb struck a U.S. military vehicle Monday, killing an American serviceman riding inside. The U.S. military is staging a major sweep in the capital in an attempt to root out insurgent cells and Shiite Muslim paramilitary organizations.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, nine corpses were discovered Monday, four in the Sunni Arab neighborhood of Karkh on the west side of the capital, and five in Rusafa, a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in the east. All the victims had been shot in the head, according to Iraqi police sources.

Two Sunni Arab men were gunned down near their homes, officials at Yarmouk Hospital said.

Three Iraqi soldiers manning a Baghdad checkpoint were killed in a drive-by shooting.

And armed men killed one civilian and injured five others in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya, a predominantly Shiite area.

Violence also flared in the southern oil hub of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and a Shiite stronghold. Armed men assassinated a colonel in the Facilities Protection Service charged with guarding oil installations, police said. Gunmen also killed a policeman and two military intelligence agents, police officials said.

Police also discovered two bullet-riddled corpses in a garbage dumpster.

And a spokesman for British forces stationed in Basra said that two Katyusha missiles struck their base Sunday night, causing no casualties.