Army deaths: The latest death reported by the military was that of a soldier who died Friday in Baghdad of noncombat-related injuries. He was not immediately identified.
At least 4,074 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes eight military civilians. At least 3,322 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.
The British military has reported 176 deaths; Italy, 33; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 21; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Denmark, seven; El Salvador, five; Slovakia, four; Latvia, three; Estonia, Georgia, the Netherlands, Thailand and Romania, two each; and Australia, Hungary, Kazakhstan and South Korea, one each.
Bomb kills two: A roadside bomb killed two civilians and wounded five others when it hit a police patrol in Basra, 340 miles south of Baghdad, police said.
Men detained: Iraqi police and soldiers detained 18 wanted men in a raid on the town of Mahmudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad. The security forces also found two bodies during the operation.
Violence in Baghdad Nineteen people have been killed and 116 wounded in clashes between security forces and militants in eastern Baghdad's Sadr City district in the past 24 hours, the two hospitals in the Shiite slum said yesterday.
Women and children were among the wounded, officials from the hospitals said after a day of sometimes-intense fighting between gunmen loyal to anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. The U.S. military, in its latest account of the fighting, said it had killed eight militants in different districts of Baghdad on Friday. It was not clear if any of those were among the bodies received by the two Sadr City hospitals.
That brings to 33 the total number of gunmen that U.S. forces say they killed in Baghdad on Thursday and Friday.
Also, five people were wounded in a rocket attack in Baghdad's western Mansour district, two bodies were found in different districts of Baghdad, and a mortar round wounded three people on eastern Baghdad's Palestine Street, police said.
Operation launched: Iraqi and U.S. troops launched an operation in northern Iraq yesterday to try to drive out al-Qaeda militants regrouped there, the Iraqi military said.
Lt. Gen. Riyadh Jalal Tawfiq, the commander of Iraqi armed forces in Nineveh province, said the operation would particularly target al-Qaeda fighters in the city of Mosul, regarded as the group's last urban stronghold in Iraq.
Tawfiq said a vehicle curfew had been imposed throughout the province, whose capital is Mosul. “I declare the beginning of the military operation today to clean the province of al-Qaeda remnants,” he told reporters. “I call on all the clerics and the heads of tribes to support the security forces in our effort to kick al-Qaeda out.” A U.S. military spokeswoman for Iraq's northern region, Maj. Peggy Kageleiry, confirmed that an operation was under way. “The (government of Iraq) ... is undertaking a new phase of operations in Mosul to counter the terrorist threat,” Kageleiry said.
