BAGHDAD (AFP) — The US military said on Saturday it regrets civilian deaths, as it announced a new surge of strikes against Al-Qaeda in Iraq in which six militants were killed and a child was hit in the crossfire.
Intensive operations including air strikes were carried out on Friday and Saturday in belts south of Baghdad and in Samarra, Tarmiyah and Mosul north of the capital, the military said in two separate statements.
The latest raids, in which 27 people were detained, follow a series of operations in Baghdad, Mahmudiyah, Yusufiyah and Musayyib in recent days in which scores of suspects were detained and nearly 20 others killed, according to US commander Brigadier General Joseph Anderson.
Iraqi officials claim at least 15 women and children were killed in two of the raids, but the US military says it has been informed of civilian deaths in only one of them, and has ordered an investigation.
"We regret when civilians are hurt or killed while coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism," US military spokesman Major Brad Leighton told AFP.
According to the Iraqi Body Count website, which keeps an independent tally of Iraqi deaths, between 74,312 and 80,954 civilians have been killed since the US-led invasion of 2003.
General Anderson, speaking to reporters in Washington via a video link on Friday, did not detail civilian deaths but said among those killed this week was Abu Usama al-Tunisi, a Tunisian described as in line to succeed Abu Ayyub al-Masri, Al-Qaeda in Iraq's Egyptian leader.
The military learned that the Tunisian was meeting with other Al-Qaeda in Iraq members south of Baghdad in the vicinity of Musayyib on Tuesday, said Anderson, the chief of staff of Multi-National Corps Iraq.
"United States Air Force F-16 aircraft attacked the target. Reporting indicated that several Al-Qaeda members with ties to senior leadership were present at that time. Three were killed, including Tunisi," he said.
A military statement on Saturday said that in a follow-up operation on Friday, troops killed one militant and wounded another in a firefight in a palm grove near Yusufiyah after closing in on an associate of Tunisi.
"During the operation, a child was inadvertently injured, treated on site and transported with his mother to a military medical facility for further treatment," the statement said.
In another operation on Friday in Samarra, a US air strike on a building used by "terrorists" killed five people, another statement said.
Iraqi officials claimed that at least 10 civilians died in a strike by US helicopters early Friday on a building in Baghdad's southwestern Dora district, a hotbed of Sunni insurgency.
Military spokesman Leighton said US forces had targeted militants firing mortars from Dora into a nearby belt of mixed Shiite and Sunni neighbourhoods.
"Surveillance elements saw the group firing their weapons. Responding to this hostile action, coalition forces called for air support and engaged the men," said Leighton.
Another US military spokesman, Major Winfield Danielson, said damage to the building was "as a result of engaging the terrorists" and that he had no confirmation that women and children were killed.
"Coalition forces target terrorists, and Al-Qaeda in Iraq continues to place innocent Iraqis into harm's way while conducting acts of terrorism," Danielson said.
"These criminals continue to deliberately place innocent Iraqi women and children in danger by targeting Iraqi and coalition forces from inhabited areas."
On Thursday, the US military announced an inquiry into an air strike on a house in Babahani village near Musayyib earlier in the week in which, according to police and an Iraqi army officer, five women and four children were killed.
The military announced that two US soldiers were killed on Saturday in separate incidents, pushing the overall toll of American losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion above 3,800.
Meanwhile, police reported that a mortar round killed Iraqi journalist Abdul Khaliq Nasser in the main northern city of Mosul, bringing to four the number of local media workers killed this month.
Police also said a car bomb struck a police patrol near Mosul killing four policemen and wounding 16 civilians.
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