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Insurgents launch attacks across iraq kill 70 { June 24 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1272-2004Jun24.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1272-2004Jun24.html
Scores Killed As Insurgents Launch Attacks Across Iraq
Marines Involved in Heavy Clashes in Fallujah
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; 8:10 AM
BAGHDAD, June 24--Iraqi insurgents launched an apparently coordinated offensive against U.S. occupation forces and Iraqi security posts in a number of locations Thursday, setting off continuing battles that killed at least 69 people, including more than 20 Iraqi police and three U.S. soldiers.
The attacks, an unusual display of ability to stage simultaneous assaults, were the broadest and largest-scale so far in an insurgent campaign of bombings and assassinations in the weeks leading up to the June 30 transfer of a limited form of sovereignty to the Iraqi Interim government.
Violence was reported in at least five Iraqi cities -- Baqubah, Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul and Baghdad -- as insurgents attacked police stations, set off car bombs and fought battles with Iraqi government forces and U.S. troops. The U.S. military responded with air strikes on insurgent positions in Baqubah and Fallujah, dropping 500-pound bombs.
The Iraqi Health Ministry said at least 66 Iraqis were killed and more than 268 wounded in the attacks. In addition, three U.S. soldiers were reported killed and at least 10 wounded in fighting and bomb blasts in Baqubah and Mosul.
The highest death toll came in Mosul, where the ministry said at least 44 people were killed in a series of car bombings. Fighting in Fallujah and Ramadi left at least nine people dead, and clashes around Baqubah killed at least 13, the ministry reported.
The largest and most sustained attack came shortly after dawn on a police station and other government buildings in Baqubah, a farming hub 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. Gunmen firing AK-47 automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades took over the town's main police station and occupied the central intersections.
The U.S. military said it was also fighting insurgents near its two bases on Baqubah's outskirts. Two U.S. soldiers were killed and seven wounded in the clashes, a spokesman for the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division said.
Local correspondents for the al-Jazeera satellite television network said 26 Iraqis were killed, including 16 policemen, and 30 were wounded in Baqubah. The insurgents raised black flags over the police station, which they still occupied at midday, they reported.
In a similar attack at Ramadi, 50 miles west of the capital, masked gunmen clad in black attacked two police stations and a government building with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, local officials told Iraqi journalists. The attackers seized one police station, killing seven policemen, then set explosives in the building and blew it up, the officials said.
At least five bombs were set off, meanwhile, in Mosul, about 220 miles north of Baghdad. Reports from the city, heavily populated by Kurds but also home to many of former president Saddam Hussein's military officers, said a U.S. soldier was killed and three others wounded. Scores of Iraqis were also killed or wounded when car bombs detonated at an Iraqi police academy, two police stations and a hospital in Mosul, news agencies reported.
In Baghdad, an explosion near a checkpoint manned by Iraqi and U.S. soldiers in the southern part of the city left four Iraqi soldiers dead and at least one American apparently wounded. The blast, which appeared to have been caused by a car bomb, also reportedly injured at least two Iraqi civilians.
In Fallujah, which lies halfway along the road linking Ramadi with Baghdad, U.S. Marines in armored vehicles were reported to be fighting insurgents on the eastern outskirts of the long-rebellious city. A U.S. Marine AH-1H Cobra helicopter gunship was shot down nearby, but its crew walked away unhurt, the Marines announced. U.S. warplanes also were seen over the city.
A group of insurgents in Fallujah issued a statement over al-Jazeera warning that they would attack all Iraq's oil pipelines and wells and set them ablaze unless the Marines halted their push toward the city.
Marines had largely kept out of Fallujah since a cease-fire was agreed early last month. Security responsibilities were turned over to a group of former Iraqi Army officers, the Fallujah Brigade, but U.S. officers have expressed disappointment that armed Islamic radicals still control the city, giving sanctuary to foreign fighters.
Four Marines who had been posted as a sniper squad atop a roof were killed and stripped of their gear earlier this week in nearby Ramadi.
The U.S. military launched a missile strike in Fallujah Tuesday against what it called a safehouse used by followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian border Islamic guerrilla leader whom U.S. officials have blamed for much of the recent violence in Iraq.
About 20 of Zarqawi's followers were killed in the blast, a senior U.S. military official said. That attack followed a similar air strike Saturday, in which Fallujah officials said about 20 people were killed, including women and children.
U.S. Army Brig Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the top American military spokesman in Iraq, said most of the fighting in Iraqi cities had subsided by noon Thursday, the Reuters news agency reported. The exception, he said, was Baqubah, where the clashes were continuing.
There, many of the insurgent fighters wore yellow headbands bearing the name in Arabic of a group calling itself Battalions of Monotheism and Holy War. Reuters said the fighters handed out leaflets telling Iraqis not to "collaborate" with Americans and warning, "The flesh of collaborators is tastier than that of Americans."
Al-Jazeera broadcast footage of fighters in Baqubah brandishing weapons and saying they were followers of Zarqawi.
According to the Associated Press, a statement quoted by a Saudi Web site Thursday claimed responsibility for the Baqubah attacks in the name of Zarqawi and warned the city's residents to "comply with the instructions of the resistance." The statement also told people to stay home "because these days are going to witness campaigns and attacks against the occupation troops and those who stand beside them."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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