US troops kill 11 attackers

AMERICAN soldiers shot dead 11 attackers who ambushed them in Samarra, northwest of Baghdad, in an upsurge of violence, as debate raged over the fate of captured former president Saddam Hussein.

US troops in Samarra “repelled a complex ambush”, a US military statement said yesterday, in one of the fiercest of a series of incidents north of the capital, in which US forces killed at least five other Iraqis.

In Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, reporters saw three US soldiers, one with head wounds, evacuated by helicopter after their Humvee vehicle hit a roadside bomb.