6/13/2005
The U.S. army said that four more American soldiers died west of Baghdad over the weekend, raising the number of U.S. personnel killed in Iraq to at least 1,701 since the 2003 invasion.
Four more U.S. Marines were killed Saturday in two separate roadside bombings west of Baghdad, the U.S. army said.
Two soldiers were killed Saturday when a bomb hit their vehicle outside Amiriyah, some 25 miles west of Baghdad. Two other soldiers also died Saturday when their vehicle stepped on a roadside bomb near Taqaddum, 45 miles west of Baghdad.
Five U.S. soldiers were killed Friday in a roadside bomb in the Anbar province.
The U.S. death toll in Iraq was 138 soldiers on May 1, 2003, when the U.S. President George W. Bush declared that major combat operations ended in the war-torn country.
On June 13, 2004, the U.S. death toll in Iraq was 825. Since then, resistance fighters have stepped up their attacks against American troops and Iraqi soldiers.
More than 940 Iraqi civilians have died since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced his government six weeks ago.
Meanwhile, Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican who voted for the Iraq war, told ABC's “This Week” that he will join congressmen proposing legislation this week demanding a timetable for the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
“I just feel that the reason of going in for weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the Iraqis to make a nuclear weapon, that's all been proven that it was never there,'' Jones said.
He said he changed his mind about the war after he attended the funeral of a U.S. soldier killed in Nasiriya, Iraq, in April 2003.
Mr Jones said he was moved by the soldier's widow who read out her husband's last letter. "And that really has been on my mind and my heart ever since," he said.
In other developments, a top U.S. diplomat survived a car bomb explosion in Baghdad, police sources said.
The U.S. official's identity was unclear and it wasn’t immediately clear if he was the target of the blast.
An Interior Ministry official said that a car bomb hit a U.S. military convoy west of Baghdad at around 2 p.m., adding that two Iraq civilians had been killed and five injured.
Witnesses said a U.S. Humvee was on fire after the attack and a U.S. helicopter arrived to evacuate the casualties. They said three American soldiers were evacuated.
Elsewhere, a bomb blast hit a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, killing three Iraqi policemen, police Lt. Qassim Mohammed said.
In the restive town of Tal Afar, three mortar rounds missed an Iraqi army barracks and landed on a house Sunday, killing a 6-year old child, police Capt. Amjad Hashim said.