Apparent suicide attacker’ targets US military base

AN apparent suicide attacker struck a US military base yesterday in the town of Ramadi, the site of repeated strikes against Iraq’s US occupiers, a US military official said.

“There was some kind of event, it may have been a suicide attack,” the official told reporters in Baghdad when queried about reports of a suicide attack on US forces there. There was no immediate word on casualties. Ramadi, about 60 miles west of Baghdad, lies in a swathe of territory north and west of the capital where US troops have faced persistent attacks from guerrillas they call loyalists of ousted President Saddam Hussein.

US forces were hoping to steadily withdraw from Ramadi and hand the majority of security and policing operations over to Iraqi forces by January. A suicide car bomb attack on a military base in the northern city of Mosul earlier this week wounded nearly 60 US soldiers, several of them seriously.

US troops yesterday seized three Iraqi men suspected of heading guerrilla cells in Saddam Hussein’s hometown, and said they had uncovered a weapons cache with enough ammunition to launch a string of attacks.

In the garden of one of the two houses raided in Tikrit, 110 miles north of Baghdad, soldiers dug up a hoard of rifles, grenades and explosives that they said were used by members of Saddam’s Fedayeen militia to mount attacks.

Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell, commander of the US 4th Infantry Division’s 1-22 Battalion which carried out the raid, described the haul as a “Fedayeen candy shop”. In Baquba, also located in the “Sunni triangle” where much of the resistance to the US-led occupation is concentrated, US troops and Iraqi police raided several buildings, arrested 16 men and seized 28 Kalashnikov rifles and bomb-making equipment.

Since Washington declared an end to major combat in Iraq on May 1, 195 US soldiers have been killed in action by anti-American and pro-Saddam insurgents.