Residents flee as US raids target al-Qaida suspects
Many walked out of Husaybah waving pieces of white cloth on sticks after coalition forces warned over loudspeakers that anyone leaving in vehicles would be shot, witnesses said.
Dozens of insurgents were killed by coalition forces in the town on Saturday, according to CNN, which had a reporter embedded with the US troops.
Brigadier General Donald Alston told reporters yesterday that no US or Iraqi troops had been killed. He had no information about possible insurgent casualties in Husaybah, a poor, mostly Sunni Arab town of 30,000 people some 200 miles north-west of Baghdad.
Coalition infantry forces supported by tanks and fighter jets dropping 500-pound bombs met more resistance than expected from insurgents in Husaybah and only managed to take control of several blocks by nightfall on Saturday.
Coalition troops sometimes found it hard to spot insurgents hiding in the town’s 4,000 homes and called in support from Abrams tanks and fighter jets.
US Marines discovered many families had fled Husaybah during the past several weeks, having been tipped off about the offensive or having assumed one was likely in the insurgent stronghold.
Two Sunni Arab politicians in Baghdad sharply criticised the offensive.
Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a moderate Sunni Arab bloc, issued a statement condemning the offensive.
“We reject all military operations directed against civilian targets because such acts lead to the killing of innocent people and the destruction of towns and cities,” he said.
Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of another Sunni faction, the National Dialogue Council, also objected to the operation.
The Operation Steel Curtain offensive is aimed at sealing off a main route for foreign fighters entering Iraq and was seen as a key to controlling the volatile Euphrates River valley of western Iraq and dislodging the insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq.
The US-led operation included about 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and will serve as a major test of the fledgling army’s capability to battle insurgents - seen as essential to enabling Washington to draw down its 157,000-strong military presence.
Elsewhere, the US military said three of its soldiers were killed in other areas of Iraq. One soldier was killed on Friday by small-arms fire south of Baghdad, and another died the same day when the vehicle in his patrol hit a mine near Habaniyah, 50 miles west of the capital.
The third soldier was killed on Saturday in a traffic accident in southern Iraq.
At least 2,045 US military personnel have died since the beginning of the war in 2003.
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