Eight US troops ‘killed in Iraqi ambush’

EIGHT American troops were reported to have been killed in an ambush on the main road of a town in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle yesterday.

The US army would not confirm if there had been any casualties in Khaldiyah.

A military convoy was hit by a remote-controlled roadside bomb and then came under heavy gunfire that destroyed at least two trucks.

An Associated Press (AP) reporter who arrived on the scene saw five US tanks, two Bradley fighting vehicles and 40 troops surrounding a neighbourhood from which gunmen opened fire after the bomb exploded. Helicopters hovered above.

Initially, as US troops were taking fire from unknown positions, soldiers were firing at random, in an apparent effort to protect themselves until reinforcements arrived, a witness said.

Arab satellite TV station Al-Arabiya reported eight Americans were killed and one wounded.

An AP driver said a three- year-old Iraqi boy had been shot in the chest.

The AP reporter was fired on by one of the tanks with three rounds from its 50-caliber machine gun and an AP photographer said his car was shot up by American fire.

The windscreen was blown out and all the tyres flattened. The photographer and his driver were not injured.

Nine miles away, a second roadside bomb hit a military convoy of three Humvees and a truck shortly after the attack in Khaldiyah. One Humvee that served as a troop carrier was engulfed in flames.

American forces in the region are extremely jumpy, caught in what increasingly is a classic guerrilla war.

Attackers and civilians look the same and when soldiers come under fire, as they did in Khaldiyah, they respond with massive firepower.

That is what apparently caused the child, the AP reporter and AP photographer to be shot at by troops.

About 100 Iraqis began dancing in the streets and carried a large poster of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.

There was celebratory gunfire and the people chanted: “With our blood, with our souls we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam.”

Khaldiyah is a town in the so-called Sunni Triangle in central Iraq, the heartland of support for Saddam and the focus of an anti-American insurgency.

Last week US soldiers mistakenly opened fire on Iraqi police cars chasing highway bandits just outside Fallujah, killing eight Iraqi officers.