- TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) -
U.S. warplanes and armoured vehicles have battered suspected guerrilla
hideouts in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit after six soldiers were
killed in the shooting down of a Black Hawk helicopter.
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- In a new attack by insurgents in the volatile town of
Falluja, west of Baghdad, two soldiers were killed and one wounded when
a roadside bomb was detonated near their convoy.
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- Since Washington declared major combat over on May 1,
at least 149 U.S. soldiers have been killed in action in Iraq, including
the six killed in Friday's downing of the Black Hawk.
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- Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Russell of the 4th Infantry
Division based in Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad, confirmed the Black
Hawk had been brought down by guerrillas.
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- "We do believe it was brought down by ground fire,"
he said.
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- Soldiers said the Black Hawk was probably hit by a rocket-propelled
grenade. It was the third U.S. helicopter to be shot down in Iraq in the
last two weeks. Last Sunday a Chinook was downed west of Baghdad, killing
16 soldiers.
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- The U.S. response was swift.
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- After dark on Friday, F-16 fighter planes swooped over
Tikrit, dropping several 500-pound bombs near the helicopter crash site.
Then raids were launched around the town -- a hotbed of anti-U.S. resistance.
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- Troops backed by Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles
destroyed several abandoned houses which the U.S. military believed had
been used by insurgents.
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- "We are targeting those areas where we have had
attacks on coalition forces," Russell said.
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- "We want to eliminate those threats."
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- OPERATION IVY CYCLONE
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- A U.S. Army statement said the raids were part of "Operation
Ivy Cyclone", a new drive to root out guerrillas in the hostile territory
around Tikrit. It said 16 people had been detained in the past 24 hours
as part of the operation, and five killed.
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- Three were shot dead after U.S. troops moved in on a
position where Iraqis had been firing rockets, one was killed in a gun
battle near the town of Balad, and one Iraqi was also killed after he fired
on troops who caught him trying to string a decapitation wire across a
road, the Army said.
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- "This operation is a concentrated, uncompromising
effort to locate and detain or eliminate any person...that seeks to harm
coalition forces or innocent Iraqis as they work together to bring stability
and security to a free Iraq," it said.
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- The U.S. military said it had seized a large cache of
mortars and rocket-propelled grenades hidden in a tomb in Samarra, which
lies between Baghdad and Tikrit.
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- In separate raid, five suspected guerrillas, including
a former lieutenant-colonel in Saddam's Republican Guard, were captured
on Thursday in Abu Ghraib west of Baghdad, and a large weapons cache was
seized near Falluja, the Army said.
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- RED CROSS CLOSES OFFICES
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- The International Committee of the Red Cross said it
had decided temporarily to shut its offices in Baghdad and the southern
city of Basra due to security concerns.
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- "We are still discussing what to do with our foreign
staff. The situation is extremely dangerous and volatile," ICRC spokesman
Florian Westphal said.
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- On October 27, suicide car bombers attacked the ICRC
and three police stations in Baghdad, killing at least 35 people.
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- Following the August truck bombing of the United Nations
headquarters in Baghdad and a string of other attacks on foreign targets,
many international organisations have left Iraq.
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- In another blow to U.S. efforts to get more countries
to share the burden of policing Iraq, Turkey confirmed it had reversed
a decision to send thousands of troops to the country.
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- Turkey's parliament voted last month to approve the deployment,
but the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council strongly objected. Turkey
is a former imperial power in Iraq and has uneasy relations with the country's
Kurds.
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- "Obviously, we would have preferred if this (had)
all worked out very nicely to everybody's satisfaction but let's remember
that the goal is stability in Iraq," U.S. State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher told reporters.
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- "There is recognition, I think, on all our parts
-- the United States' side, Turkish as well as the Iraqis -- that maybe
this deployment at this time would not add to that goal in the way that
we had hoped it would."
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- Iraq's interim Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari -- a
Kurd -- welcomed the Turkish decision.
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- "I think the Iraqi people, all of them, would welcome
Turkey's decision as wise and rational," he told Reuters.
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