Blasts kill 5 U.S. troops; 2 Iraqis slain in clashes

Five U.S. soldiers were killed Sunday in roadside bombings, four of them in a blast east of the capital, the military said.

The deaths came as clashes erupted in central Baghdad between Iraqi security forces and gunmen firing from the rooftops and alleys, killing at least two Iraqis and injuring six. They were among at least 27 Iraqis slain or found dead during the day.

Busy city streets emptied as the fighting broke out in the afternoon in Fadhil, a notorious hide-out of Sunni Arab insurgents. Gunmen attacked Iraqi army patrols and the two sides traded fire for more than an hour, officials and residents said.

At least two civilians were killed and three injured in the crossfire, they said. Three Iraqi soldiers also were wounded.

The fighting, the latest in a series of skirmishes in the area, came as thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops comb some of Baghdad’s most contested neighborhoods for fighters and weapons caches in the latest attempt to quell sectarian violence.

In northwest Baghdad, one U.S. soldier was killed when a roadside bomb exploded during a route clearance operation, the military said. Four others were killed and two injured in a similar attack in neighboring Diyala province, where insurgents fleeing the Baghdad crackdown are believed to have sought refuge.

At least 3,241 U.S. personnel have been killed since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, according to the website icasualties.org, which tracks military casualties.

South of the capital, in Haswa, at least two Sunni mosques were bombed early Sunday in apparent reprisals for the destruction of a Shiite mosque the previous day. The buildings were empty, and the blasts caused no casualties, police said.

Gunmen later fired at the funeral procession for the victims of Saturday’s blast, sparking a riot, according to U.S. troops and Iraqi police at the scene. Shiite mourners abandoned the coffins and rushed toward one of the Sunni mosques but were turned back by U.S. and Iraqi security forces, local police said.

Maj. Gen. Qais Hamza, the Babil provincial police chief, disputed the account. The mourners did not come under attack and were the ones who fired in the air, he said.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab group, said the mob also attacked its office in Haswa, but Hamza disputed that too.

U.S. and Iraqi security forces quickly contained the violence, the U.S. military said in a statement. It did not elaborate.

The mourners then collected the coffins, loaded them onto vehicles and headed south to Najaf for burial, police said.

At least 13 people were killed and 45 injured Saturday when a truck bomb exploded outside a mosque in Haswa that houses a political office of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, police said. The blast punched a hole in the minaret, which was left standing in a pile of rubble.

Violence has increased outside Baghdad since Feb. 13, when U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a crackdown in the capital.

The deployment of thousands of extra troops has helped reduce the number of execution-style killings blamed on sectarian death squads, though the numbers have started creeping back up. On Sunday, police recovered 17 unidentified bodies in Baghdad.

Sadr’s cooperation has been crucial to the plan. Under intense pressure from the Shiite-led government, the cleric ordered his Al Mahdi militiamen to pull back to avoid confrontations with the U.S. military.

Despite the crackdown, bomb blasts largely blamed on Sunni insurgents have continued.

A roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi army patrol exploded in front of Baghdad’s Yarmouk Hospital on Sunday, killing one soldier, police said.

Police defused two bombs in the hospital complex, where many of the victims of the bloodshed are taken. One device was hidden under a car parked behind a small police office adjacent to the emergency ward, police said. The other was hidden inside a nylon bag in the hospital pharmacy.

A civilian was killed by sniper fire in downtown Baghdad, police said. Another man, the manager of a liquid gas company, was gunned down in the northern city of Mosul, police said.

Two mortar rounds hit a Shiite enclave in south Baghdad’s mostly Sunni neighborhood of Dora, killing two people and injuring five, police said.

North of the capital, a roadside bomb killed three Iraqi soldiers and injured a fourth near Baiji, police said.

zavis@latimes.com

*

Special correspondents in Baghdad, Tikrit and Hillah contributed to this report.