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Roadside bomb kills three U.S. soldiers in Iraq
2008-03-11
A roadside bomb killed three U.S. soldiers and an interpreter in Iraq's Diyala province on Monday, the same day a suicide bomber killed five U.S. soldiers in the capital Baghdad, the U.S. military said on Tuesday. Ethnically and religiously mixed Diyala is one of four provinces north of Baghdad where U.S. and Iraqi forces have mounted offensives this year to fight al Qaeda militants who have regrouped in the region. The bombing in Baghdad, which the U.S. military had confirmed on Monday, was the worst single attack on U.S. forces in the capital in nearly nine months. Also in Iraq's north, police said four Iraqi policemen, four gunmen and one civilian were killed on Tuesday in an attack on a security checkpoint in the city of Mosul, which the U.S. military says is al Qaeda's last major urban stronghold. Monday's deaths took to at least 3,982 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. Ten soldiers have been killed this month, compared to 81 in the whole of March 2007. Violence across Iraq has dropped 60 percent since 30,000 extra U.S. troops became fully deployed in June, and a decision by Sunni tribal leaders to turn on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda. But recent attacks demonstrate that Iraq is far from safe, and a suicide car bomb in Sulaimaniya on Monday showed that even Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish north, considered the most stable region of in the country, is vulnerable. The U.S. death toll is approaching 4,000 at a time when setting a timetable for withdrawing troops has become a central issue in the presidential election campaign. Some 2,000 U.S. soldiers are being withdrawn from Baghdad under a Pentagon plan to pull out five brigades by July 31. U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said on Sunday a recent increase in bombings was not the start of a wider trend and that violence was down overall. (Editing by Stephen Weeks)
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