BAGHDAD (AFP) — US and Iraqi forces launched a fresh assault against Al-Qaeda on Tuesday, the US military said, amid a surge of violence across Iraq that has killed some 90 people since the new year began.
"(Phantom Phoenix) is a series of joint Iraqi and coalition... operations to pursue and neutralise remaining Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other extremist elements," Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, the US second-in-command in Iraq, said in a statement.
The location of the operation was not identified, but US commanders say Al-Qaeda fighters have shifted to northern Iraq, especially Diyala and Nineveh provinces, after being chased out of Baghdad by a "surge" of American forces.
Odierno said the assault "will exploit recent security gains and disrupt terrorist support zones and enemy command and control."
Phantom Phoenix, he said, would also involve "non-lethal" aspects designed "to improve delivery of essential services, economic development and local governance capacity."
One operation, dubbed Iron Harvest, involves four US infantry companies -- about 640 soldiers -- around the town of Muqdadiyah, 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of Baghdad in Diyala province, Colonel Brad Coffey told reporters in the provincial capital Baquba.
Iron Harvest is targeting around 200 Al-Qaeda fighters in the Muqdadiyah area, he added.
In a later statement, the US military said it had killed three suspected militants and arrested another 28 in operations in central and northern Iraq in the past two days.
It did not say if the operations were part of Phantom Phoenix.
The fresh assault follows a surge of killings that has shattered a relative lull in the closing weeks of 2007.
In Baghdad, at least 45 people have been killed in a series of attacks since Sunday, including strikes against members of so-called Awakening groups which are being formed by the US military as part of its fight against Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
On Monday, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at the offices of the Sunni Foundation near northern Adhamiyah neighbourhood, killing at least 14 people including the local Awakening chief Colonel Riyadh al-Samarraie.
The same day, gunmen kidnapped eight Awakening members at a checkpoint in Shaab, a mainly Shiite neighbourhood in northeastern Baghdad, an Iraqi official said.
Ismael Abbas, the Awakening leader in Shaab, was shot dead in the street by gunmen using silenced weapons, he added.
At least three Awakening leaders in Baghdad have now been killed in the past three weeks, after the head of the militia in Jamia in western Baghdad was shot dead as he left a mosque on December 22.
In other violence on Tuesday in the capital, a police colonel was shot dead by unidentified attackers in the mainly Shiite Zafaraniyah neighbourhood in the southeast, an interior ministry official said.
In the western Mansour district, a tax department official was shot dead by gunmen as he left his home, while a municipal official was killed in a roadside bomb in the western Yarmuk neighbourhood.
At Salman Pak, around 25 kilometres (16 miles) southeast of Baghdad, two policemen were killed and eight people, four of them police, were wounded when a suicide bomber attacked a security checkpoint, police said.
The male bomber disguised himself in the all-covering abaya garment worn by women, a police official said.
The new year began bloodily when a suicide bomber attacked a funeral on January 1 in the capital, killing at least 30 people.
Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, in a recording released on December 29, warned Sunni Muslims in Iraq not to take up arms against the terror network, saying that those who did so were "traitors."
Members of the Awakening councils, he said, have "betrayed the nation and brought shame and scandal, that will be followed by damnation for ever unless they repent."
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