BAGHDAD, Iraq – Heavy fighting surged Friday in the Euphrates river city of Ramadi, police and hospital officials said, and the U.S. military reported the deaths of two more soldiers around the militant stronghold, the scene of seven American deaths this month.
In Baghdad, a suicide bomber on a public bus set off an explosives belt as the vehicle approached a busy terminal Friday, killing at least five people and wounding eight, police said. Elsewhere in the capital, a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Army soldier whose convoy was patrolling southeastern Baghdad Friday night.
Also in the capital, gunmen killed a member of the commission charged with ensuring former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime are banned from the Iraqi government, police said. Thirteen commission members have been killed since the panel was created two years ago.
The U.S. military declined to say whether it was conducting a large offensive against Ramadi, but police and residents have reported heavy fighting there during the past week. Seven service members have died in or near the city since Sept. 1.
“There are 30 to 40 battalion-level operations going on across Iraq on any given day,” said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad. “What you are seeing is the pattern of operations that we have been conducting almost every day here.”
The latest military deaths occurred Thursday: one a roadside bombing between Ramadi and nearby Fallujah, the other in a gun battle in Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad. Those killings raised to at least 1,912 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.
Ramadi police Capt. Nasir Al-Alousi said American forces airlifted equipment into the city stadium before dawn Friday. He said clashes erupted in that area and spread to an industrial zone after sunrise, continuing until at least midday.
Dr. Omar al-Rawi at Ramadi General Hospital said two people were killed and eight wounded in the fighting. Police Lt. Mohammed Tirbas Al-Obaidi said a roadside bomb destroyed an American armored vehicle, but it was impossible to say whether there were casualties because U.S. forces blocked off the area.
In the southern city of Basra, meanwhile, an Iraqi government delegation from Baghdad was meeting with a provincial commission to examine evidence about anti-British rioting in the city Monday and tensions that have developed between local authorities and British forces in the region.
The violence broke out after two undercover British soldiers were jailed in the city and demonstrators attacked armored fighting vehicles the British deployed around the prison. Five Iraqis were killed in the mayhem.
British troops used the armored vehicles to crash through the walls of the prison and later freed the two soldiers, whom London said had fallen into the hands of militiamen.
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