US tightens grip on insurgent stronghold

THE US military launched a major combat operation yesterday as 1,000 US Marines and Iraqi soldiers fanned out to track down insurgents and foreign fighters in a volatile western province straddling Syria.

Operation Spear started in the pre-dawn hours in Anbar province, the military said. The area is where US forces said it killed about 40 militants in airstrikes in Karabilah on June 11.

The operation began a day after Air Force Brigadier General Don Alston called the Syrian border the “worst problem” in terms of stemming the influx of foreign fighters into Iraq. Syria is under intense pressure from Washington and Baghdad to tighten control of its porous 380-mile border with Iraq.

The marines have lost 11 men and two sailors in the past week in separate incidents around Anbar.

Also yesterday, a suicide car bomber slammed into a loaded fuel tanker as it drove through Baghdad’s eastern suburbs, killing two people and injuring another six, police said.

The car hit the tanker after it missed an Iraqi army patrol in the Kamaliyah suburb.

The US military said a child was killed during an “escalation of force” incident between a vehicle and an army foot patrol in western Baghdad at about 9pm on Thursday.

Iraqi police sergeant Najim Abdullah said a 10-year-old boy was killed while walking on a street.

Elsewhere, a suicide car bomber rammed into an Iraqi army convoy in northern Iraq, injuring at least seven people - three soldiers, three civilians and a policeman.

The blast came on the heels of a suicide car bomb on Baghdad’s airport road on Thursday that killed at least eight police officers and wounded 25 more.

Separately, US Staff Sgt Alberto B Martinez was charged with murder on Wednesday in the deaths last week of two army officers at a base north of Baghdad, the military said.

The military initially attributed the June 7 killings of the officers - Captain Phillip T Esposito and First Lieutenant Louis E Allen - to an insurgent mortar attack near Tikrit.