The US military said on Saturday it had killed about 50 insurgents as it pressed on with two assaults in the restive western Iraqi province of Al-Anbar near the border with Syria. For a second day, a force of about 1,000 US marines and Iraqi soldiers scoured the Karabilah region in search of insurgents and weapons.
"Approximately 50 insurgents have been killed since the operation began yesterday morning," said US Captain Jeffrey Pool. There was no independent confirmation of the casualties. Pool said the troops had found four Iraqis who had been beaten, handcuffed and chained to a wall in a bunker in the town.
In a further effort to restrict the movement of insurgents operating in Anbar, another US-Iraqi force of about 1,000 men is concentrated on an area around Lake Tharthar, north-west of Baghdad, as part of Operation Khanjar, Arabic for dagger.
Despite the security efforts in Baghdad, Brigadier General Mundher al-Bayati, a doctor in the former army of Saddam Hussein, was gunned down in the capital when he answered his door, said an interior ministry source.
And Jawad Kazem, a 39-year-old Iraq correspondent with the Arab news channel Al-Arabiya, was shot and seriously wounded in an attempted kidnapping at a popular downtown Baghdad restaurant.