'Al Qaeda fight to death in Iraq bastion': 17 suspects killed in Khalis

Thousands of US soldiers on the offensive north of Baghdad are facing fierce resistance from hundreds of al Qaeda militants who are ready to fight to the death, an American general said on Friday.
The militants are making their stand in and around the Iraqi city of Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, where the US military on Tuesday launched one of its biggest operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
"It is house to house, block to block, street to street, sewer to sewer," said Brigadier-General Mick Bednarek, commander of Operation Arrowhead Ripper in Iraq's Diyala province. Not far from Baquba, US attack helicopters killed 17 suspected al Qaeda gunmen on the outskirts of the town of Khalis early on Friday, the US military said.
The military said those killed were armed and had been acting suspiciously around an Iraqi police patrol. That brings to 68 the number of militants killed so far in the operation. US officials accuse Sunni al Qaeda of using car bombings and other violence to try to tip Iraq into full-scale sectarian civil war. A suicide truck bomb blamed on al Qaeda killed 87 people outside a Shia mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday.
Bednarek estimated several hundred al Qaeda militants were at Baquba and it would be a long and dangerous job for US forces to flush them out. "They will not go any further. They will fight to the death," Bednarek told Reuters and another news agency.
"There have been houses that were used by al Qaeda as safe houses ... their entire structures rigged with massive explosives." Baquba is the capital of Diyala province. The region has long been an al Qaeda hotbed, but attacks against US and Iraqi forces have soared here since a four-month-old US-led security crackdown in Baghdad and operations elsewhere prompted many al Qaeda militants and other gunmen to seek sanctuary in Diyala.
The campaign is part of a broader offensive involving tens of thousands of US and Iraqi soldiers pushing on with simultaneous operations in Baghdad, and to the south and west of the capital. Tough fighting is expected over the next 45-60 days, US military officials have said, sketching a rough timeline for the combined operations.