U.S. Forces in Iraq Kill 6 Militants

By THOMAS WAGNER

BAGHDAD, Iraq – American soldiers destroyed two buildings being used by insurgents in a town in Anbar province, killing six militants, two women and a toddler, the military said Sunday.

It was the latest of several recent raids during which women or children have been killed or wounded as U.S. forces attacked insurgents in residential areas. In some of the attacks, the U.S. command accused the militants of taking over buildings for use as safe houses and of using civilians as human shields.

Elsewhere, the U.S. military said three American soldiers were killed Saturday by roadside bombs – two in the insurgent stronghold of Anbar province west of Baghdad and one near Taji, north of the capital. The U.S. Air Force confirmed that an American pilot whose F-16 went down in Anbar on Nov. 27 was killed, using DNA analysis to identify his remains.

In Baghdad, the death toll from Saturday’s triple car bombing at a food market in a predominantly Shiite area rose to 53 civilians dead and 121 wounded, said police Col. Nabil Abdul Kadir.

Three parked cars blew up nearly simultaneously as shoppers were buying fruit, vegetables, meat and other items in the busy al-Sadriyah district. The blasts clouds of smoke over concrete high-rises in the area, which has narrow alleys that made it difficult for ambulances and fire trucks to navigate.

It was one of the worst incidents since a bombing and mortar attack killed 215 people and wounded more than 200 in the Shiite district of Sadr City in Baghdad on Nov. 23 amid increasing retaliatory attacks between Shiites and Sunnis.

Nobody claimed responsibility for the market attack, but it followed a Friday raid by Iraqi forces backed by U.S. helicopters targeting Sunni insurgents in al-Fadhil, less than a half-mile away.

The Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq condemned the al-Fadhil raid in a statement Saturday, alleging six people were killed and 13 detained.

In Washington, it was disclosed that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had submitted a classified memo to the White House two days before he resigned, calling for major changes in the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy.

"In my view it is time for a major adjustment," Rumsfeld wrote in the Nov. 6 memo. "Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough."

On Saturday night in the town of Karmah, coalition ground and air forces killed six insurgents while destroying two buildings that militants were using, the military said. Searching through one of the destroyed buildings, coalition forces also found a weapons cache and the bodies of two women and a boy who was believed to be under 2 years old, the military said. Three suspected insurgents also were detained.

Dr. Abdul-Hakim al-Dulaimi, director of the emergency room at Karmah Hospital, said 12 bodies were brought there on Sunday morning: nine Iraqi men, two women in their 40s and a 3-year-old boy.

The town, 50 miles west of Baghdad, is in Anbar province, the large area of western Iraq where many of the country’s Sunni Arab insurgent groups operate.

"Coalition forces take precautions to mitigate risks to civilians while in pursuit of terrorists. However, terrorists continue to put innocent civilians in danger by operating among them," the U.S. military statement said.

Two roadside bomb attacks on Saturday – one north of Baghdad near the Taji Air Force base and the other in the western province of Anbar – killed three American soldiers.

The U.S. Air Force on Sunday announced the death of Maj. Troy L. Gilbert, 34, whose F-16 fighter crashed in Anbar on Nov. 27. U.S. forces have said insurgents reached the crash site before American forces. The cause of the crash is under investigation, but officials said they did not believe Gilbert was shot down.

Seven Iraqis were killed and 12 wounded in other violence on Sunday. Among the deaths were three policemen killed by a suicide bomber at a checkpoint near the northern city of Kirkuk.

On Saturday night, gunmen in two cars intercepted a vehicle carrying Haithem Yassin, a Shiite adviser to Iraq’s minister of electricity, in northeast Baghdad, kidnapping him, his driver and two bodyguards, Karim Sultan Jassim, a ministry spokesman, said Sunday.

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Associated Press writers Sameer N. Yacoub and Sinan Salaheddin contributed to this report from Baghdad.