IRAQ:Thousands of US soldiers on the offensive north of Baghdad are facing fierce resistance from hundreds of al-Qaeda militants who are ready to fight to the death, an American general said yesterday.
The militants are making their stand in and around the Iraqi city of Baquba, 65km north of Baghdad, where the US military on Tuesday launched one of its biggest operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
"It is house to house, block to block, street to street, sewer to sewer," said Brig-Gen Mick Bednarek, commander of operation "Arrowhead Ripper" in Iraq's Diyala province.
Not far from Baquba, attack helicopters killed 17 suspected al-Qaeda gunmen on the outskirts of the town of Khalis early yesterday. The military said that those killed were armed and had been acting suspiciously around an Iraqi police patrol. This brings to 68 the number of militants killed so far in the operation.
A top US commander suggested that it could be next spring before Iraqi forces were ready to take responsibility for areas cleared by US troops in "Arrowhead Ripper" and other operations taking place around Baghdad as part of a broader offensive.
"I think, if everything goes the way it's going now, there's a potential that by the spring we would be able to reduce forces and Iraqi security forces could take over," Lt-Gen Ray Odierno said.
Odierno, the top commander for day-to-day operations in Iraq, told reporters that Iraqi forces might be ready sooner, but it was hard to predict exactly when.
US officials accuse Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda of using car-bombings and other violence to try to tip Iraq into full-scale sectarian civil war. A suicide truck bomb blamed on al-Qaeda killed 87 people outside a Shia mosque in Baghdad last Tuesday.
Brig-Gen Bednarek estimated that several hundred al-Qaeda militants were in and around Baquba and said it would be a long and dangerous job for US forces to flush them out. "They will not go any further. They will fight to the death," he said. "There have been houses that were used by al-Qaeda as safe houses . . . their entire structures rigged with massive explosives."
Baquba is the capital of Diyala province. The region has long been an al-Qaeda hotbed, but attacks against US and Iraqi forces have soared here since a four-month-old US-led security crackdown in Baghdad and operations elsewhere prompted many al-Qaeda militants and other gunmen to seek sanctuary in Diyala. - ( Reuters)