1.

In Iraq

U.S. FORCES PUSH TOWARD SYRIAN BORDER, AFTER INITIAL STIFF RESISTANCE FROM MILITANTS
By Antonio Castaneda

Associated Press
May 10, 2005 -- 3:08 p.m. PDT

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/20050510-1508-iraq.html

BAGHDAD -- When U.S. forces pushed into a remote desert town near the Syrian frontier, they found insurgents surprisingly well organized and equipped. Fighters had piled sandbags in front of homes. Some of the insurgents wore uniforms and body armor as they fired down on the Americans from rooftops and balconies.

The first 48 hours of a major U.S. assault near the Syrian border saw some of the fiercest fighting since militants were driven from Fallujah six months ago, underscoring the growing sophistication of the insurgency more than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. military believes the bulk of insurgent forces in Iraq have moved from their former strongholds in Fallujah and Ramadi to points north and west, Marine Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday.

"There are reports that these people are in uniforms, in some cases are wearing protective vests, and there's some suspicion that their training exceeds what we have seen with other engagements further east," he said.

After more than a day of intense fighting with militants entrenched on the south bank of the Euphrates River, Marines saw only light resistance Tuesday as they advanced through sparsely populated settlements along a 12-mile stretch to the border with Syria, according to a Chicago Tribune reporter James Janega, who was embedded with the U.S. force.

Insurgents kidnapped the provincial governor as a bargaining chip Tuesday, telling his family he would be released when U.S. forces withdrew from Qaim, the town 200 miles west of Baghdad where the offensive began late Saturday. Gov. Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi was seized as he drove from Qaim to the provincial capital of Ramadi, his brother, Hammad, told The Associated Press.

Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Iraq, said: "We don't respond to insurgent or terrorist demands."

The biggest U.S. offensive since Fallujah six months ago is aimed at flushing out followers of Iraq's most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

At least three Marines were reported killed and 20 wounded during the first three days of Operation Matador. The U.S. command said as many as 100 insurgents died in the first 48 hours -- many of them trapped under rubble when attack planes and helicopter gunships pounded their hideouts.

But Marine commanders in the field told the Chicago Tribune that militants put up an unexpectedly intense fight in villages along the Euphrates, which snakes across the desert toward the Syrian border.

As troops erected a pontoon bridge Sunday, mortar fire began to fall on them from the nearby town of Obeidi, 185 miles west of Baghdad, the Tribune said.

Navy and Marine F/A-18 Hornet strike jets strafed the tree line and Marine Cobra attack helicopters fired rockets into insurgent hideouts, the Tribune said.

When Marines entered the town Sunday, they found insurgents prepared for battle. Sandbag bunkers stood in front of some houses, and other gunmen fired from rooftops and balconies, according to a Los Angeles Times reporter also embedded with the troops. Fighting continued into Monday with insurgents using boats to ferry weapons across the river.

At one point, the paper said, a Marine walked into a house and a fighter hiding in the basement fired through a floor grate, killing him. Another Marine suffered shrapnel wounds when an insurgent threw a grenade through the window of a house where he was retrieving a wounded comrade, the Times said.

Insurgents attacked a Marine convoy late Monday near a U.S. base in Qaim with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, roadside bombs and two suicide car bombs, a Marine spokesman, Capt. Jeffrey Pool, said. One explosion damaged a Humvee, and a suicide car bomber was destroyed by a Marine tank. No Marines were killed and 10 insurgents surrendered in the incident, Pool said.

Residents reached by telephone in the area reported some fighting Tuesday in Obeidi and the two nearby towns of Rommana and Karabilah. They said frightened residents were taking advantage of the relative lull to flee the Qaim area.

Adel Izzedine left on foot with his wife and three children, walking six miles through farm fields to reach a village where the family caught a taxi and drove 43 miles to Rawa, east of the fighting.

"There are gunmen in the city, but there are also a lot of innocent civilians," said Izzedine, who was looking for a mosque or a school in which to spend the night. "We are living the same misery that Fallujah lived some time ago."

Intelligence reports indicated insurgents were using the region, a known smuggling route, as a staging area where foreign fighters cross into Iraq from Syria and receive weapons and equipment for attacks in Baghdad, Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul and other cities, Pool said.

Syria has said it is arresting would-be infiltrators and doing what it can to control the border with Iraq.

The U.S. offensive comes amid a surge of militant attacks that have targeted the U.S. military and Iraqi security forces and civilians, since the country's first democratically elected government was announced April 28.

At least two car bombs exploded Tuesday in downtown Baghdad, targeting U.S. and Iraqi troops. At least nine Iraqis were killed and 19 wounded, the Interior Ministry said. One of the bombs wounded three American soldiers, a U.S. military spokeswoman, Capt. Kelly Lewis, said.

Also Tuesday, Iraq's parliament appointed a 55-member committee of legislators from the country's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish groups to draft a new constitution. Political leaders spent the first three months after landmark Jan. 30 elections forming a government and now have until Aug. 15 to complete the charter, which would then be voted on in a national referendum.

--Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue and Qassim Abdul-Zahara in Baghdad contributed to this report.

2.

U.S. SAYS FIGHTING PAUSES IN WESTERN IRAQ AS REBELS REGROUP
By John F. Burns and Richard A. Oppel Jr.

New York Times
May 10, 2005 -- 3:38 p.m. EDT

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/international/middleeast/10cnd-iraq.html

BAGHDAD -- Insurgents who control parts of the western Iraqi desert appeared to have fallen back to regroup as the Marines prepared a new assault on a force of more than 200 fighters hiding or roaming the towns and desert in the remote areas just east of the Syrian border, a Marine commander said today.

"The enemy, as you expect, once you hit them hard they have a tendency to go to ground," said Marine Col. Bob Chase, the chief of operations for the Second Marine Division, after a two-day battle that has drawn American troops into their heaviest fighting in six months. "There are some locations that we are waiting for the timing to be correct."

The governor of Anbar province, the Sunni Arab province that sprawls westward from Falluja, near Baghdad, to Qaim and Ubaydi in the Jazira Desert where the Marines are fighting, was kidnapped today by gunmen who told his family he would be released when the United States military pulled out of Qaim, news agencies reported.

The governor, Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi, was kidnapped driving from Qaim to Ramadi, the reports said. Kidnappers "demanded that American forces leave Qaim in order to release him," the governor's brother, Hammad, told the Associated Press. The capture of the province's chief official would be a major propaganda coup for the rebels, but a Marine spokesman at the division's headquarters in the provincial capital of Ramadi said he could not confirm the accuracy of the reports.

The apparent pause in the fighting along the Syrian border was accompanied, in Baghdad, by two new car bombings today. In one, a parked car packed with explosives detonated as a convoy of American and Iraqi troops drove along Sadoun Street in the heart of the capital's commercial district, killing at least seven people and injuring 23, according to interior ministry officials. The attack occurred within 300 yards of a suicide bombing on Saturday on the same street in which 22 people were killed, including two American security contractors.

The American military command said that three of its soldiers were wounded in the latest attack, which witnesses said occurred as a convoy of Humvees and other armored vehicles drove up the street in mid-morning. A survivor who was lightly wounded, Sadiq Mustafa, said he had seen a red Opel car parked near a sidewalk café. "The police asked what it was doing there, and we said we didn't know," Mr. Mustafa said. And then the American convoy drove by, and the car exploded.

Later in the morning, a suicide bomber drove into the entrance of a police compound housing a boat unit that patrols the Tigris river opposite the Green Zone, the heavily-fortified area on the river's west bank that is base for Iraq's transitional government and the American embassy. That attack, about three miles south of the earlier bombing, wounded three policemen, according to a police spokesman.

In other developments, an insurgent attack on Monday night on a convoy near al-Asad, about 90 miles northwest of Baghdad, appeared to have resulted in the rebels taking a Japanese security contractor hostage.

Japan's foreign ministry said in a statement in Tokyo that Hart Security, a British company that employed Akihiko Saito, had reported him missing. An insurgent group, Ansar al-Sunna, posted a picture of Mr. Saito on its website, along with an identification card in his name.

The Japanese spokesman, Hatsuhisa Takashima, said that Mr. Saito had served 20 years in the French Foreign Legion, according to a Reuters report from Tokyo, which quoted the spokesman as saying that several people appeared to have been killed in the attack. Japan's defense minister, Yoshinoro Ohno, was quoted in the same report as saying that the incident would not affect the deployment of Japan's 550 non-combat troops at Samawa in southern Iraq. "The security there is not particularly worsening," Mr. Ohno said.

At the weekend, more than 1,000 United States troops operating under a Marine regimental combat team supported by helicopter gunships and fighter jets swept into insurgent-controlled areas along the Euphrates River near Syria to root out foreign fighters and Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. American commanders say the insurgents have used the far-flung region as a way-station for smuggling fighters, weaponry, cars and money to rebels in Baghdad, Mosul and other cities.

The Marines said today that after inflicting heavy casualties on the insurgents, they paused to gather intelligence for new attacks. But reporters embedded with Marine combat units said the American troops had encountered unexpectedly strong resistance, with fierce house to house fighting against sandbag-fortified insurgent positions.

These reports said the insurgents had employed "baited attacks," detonating bombs and then shelling and shooting at American troops who rushed forward to the blast sites. One insurgent hiding in a basement killed a Marine by firing up through a floor grate at troops entering the house.

"They were clearly holding their ground," Marine Col. Stephen Davis, commander of the Marine regimental combat team, told the Los Angeles Times. "This continues to be a problem area. They've got seasoned fighters out here -- this is a dedicated enemy that needs to be rooted out. That could take days, or weeks or months. We'll stay here until it's done."

The Marines say they crossed the Euphrates River around Ubaydi, about 180 miles northwest of Baghdad, and are now pushing west toward the Syrian border, fighting insurgents who have taken refuge in desert outposts or holed up in safe houses in the heavily-Sunni towns along the Euphrates. Many insurgents are believed to have pulled back to towns on the northern side of the river close to the border, Col. Chase said. About 100 insurgents have been killed and at least 16 captured, the military said, with at least three Marines killed.

Military spokesmen have described many of the dead insurgents as members of the terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is America's most-wanted man in Iraq. His group issued an internet statement today calling United States claims of heavy enemy deaths "lies" and insisting that "our mujahadeen in Qaim are well."

In a telephone interview today, Col. Chase, the Marine operations chief, speaking from the Marines' headquarters at Ramadi, said fighting had eased since Monday night when insurgents staged a counterattack on a Marine convoy near the border with two suicide car bombs, several roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. One car bomber hit a Humvee and the other was destroyed by an M-1 Abrams tank, he said. No Marines were killed in the attack.