Five Marines killed in fierce fighting near Syrian border

By Seattle Times news services

	POOL / GETTY IMAGES A U.S. soldier walks through a partly constructed building at the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters yesterday in Najaf, Iraq. The authority has come under regular mortar and small-arms fire in the last few weeks.
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BAGHDAD, Iraq — Five Marines were killed and scores of insurgents slain in a fierce 14-hour battle yesterday between Marines and mujahedeen fighters who slipped into Husaybah, a town 180 miles northeast of Baghdad near the Syrian border, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter embedded with the Marines reported.

According to Marines, an estimated 300 Iraqis believed to have come west from the Fallujah and Ramadi area launched an assault against the Americans around 8 a.m. local time, beginning with a roadside bombing and a flurry of 24 mortar shell.

When Marines responded to the bombing, they were met with small-arms and machine-gun fire. Marines responding to the call for help were then mortared and fired on as they made their way into the city.

Fighting continued late into the night as Marine Cobra helicopter gunships strafed enemy positions near a downtown soccer stadium and Marine helicopters continued to take wounded to their main base 22 miles away at Camp Al-Qaim.

At least nine Marines were injured and about 20 Iraqis captured, Marines said.

All of the Marine deaths occurred in the first hour of fighting when Marines went to clear out a house where Iraqi fighters were hiding.

The battalion commander, Col. Matthew Lopez, said he believed the Marines had crushed the insurgents' attack.

"I don't think they expected us to retaliate as hard as we did," said Lopez, 40, of Chicago, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines.

The military announced yesterday that a U.S. soldier was killed Thursday when his patrol hit an anti-tank mine near Tikrit, north of Baghdad, and that another was killed Friday after an attack by Shiite militiamen near Najaf.

At least 94 troops have been killed in combat since April 1. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq a year ago, at least 692 Americans have died, 498 of them in combat.
 
Stretches of highway shut down

Elsewhere, the U.S. military command yesterday closed down long stretches of two strategic highways leading to Baghdad as American troops labored against attacks that have severely reduced the flow of food, fuel and other supplies into the capital.

The closings appeared to confirm the effect of two weeks of heightened violence in Iraq. U.S. soldiers, stretched thin, have already been deployed in large numbers to contain serious and unresolved uprisings in the cities of Fallujah and Najaf. Now they have been sent to face the growing problem of keeping crucial sections of highway open for the passage of critically needed convoys coming from Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait.

The American command's hope appears to be that by keeping all civilian traffic off the roads on the approaches to Baghdad, it will be more difficult for insurgents to mount ambushes against the trucks and convoys in the most dangerous sections of the highways.

Travelers heading north yesterday to Baghdad on the main highway from Kuwait before the closure saw at least three highway bridges destroyed in a 60-mile section immediately south of the capital.

"It's a very bad situation," said Munadel Abdul Ellah, a Hilla resident who spent nearly eight hours making a round trip that usually takes only two hours. "There were so many troops on the highway. It was like when they first came to occupy the airport last year during the war."

American forces had already effectively lost control of long sections of the highway leading west from Baghdad to Jordan. The road runs through the battle zone around Fallujah, 35 miles west of the capital. Ambushes near Fallujah and the adjacent city of Abu Ghraib have destroyed numerous convoys carrying supplies for American troops in the past two weeks.

"We've got to fix those roads, we've also got to protect those roads," Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said in Baghdad.

The military warned that civilians found on the closed sections "may be considered to be anti-coalition forces" and come under U.S. fire. Kimmitt said civilians would be redirected around the closed sections.

"There are many ways to get into Baghdad and many ways for getting out of Baghdad," he said.

Kimmitt said there were "alternative methods" of delivering ammunition, food and fuel, presumably by air. But a senior American official said yesterday that supplies at the American occupation authority's headquarters in Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace in central Baghdad were approaching a critical point. Canteens feeding 2,000 people, civilians as well as military personnel, may soon be forced to serve combat rations in plastic sleeves, known as "meals ready to eat."

U.S. officials said early last week that Kellogg Brown & Root, a private American military contractor and a Halliburton subsidiary, had stopped all convoys running into Iraq.

On Friday, the company issued a statement that it had resumed convoys into Iraq, but it did not say at what level. A senior American officer said the company was responsible for delivering 40 percent of drinking water, food and fuel consumed by the American occupation authority and the 135,000-soldier command.

Fallujah quiet, talks to resume

In Fallujah, which has been under siege by U.S. Marines for nearly two weeks, the quiet that descended Friday continued through yesterday as negotiations went on. A nominal truce since April 11 had been repeatedly shaken as both insurgents and Marines dug in.

Talks toward ending the standoff were to resume today, but the top U.S. military negotiator suggested their continuation depended on continued quiet.

"I can't stress enough how key it is for the cease-fire to hold over the next 24 to 48 hours," said Maj. Gen. Joseph Weber, the top U.S. military negotiator.

Negotiations focused on strengthening a fragile truce, allowing residents access to hospitals and arranging the return of tens of thousands who have fled the city.

The two sides are also working on a way to carry out the handover of the killers of four American civilians, whose slaying and mutilation sparked the Marine assault on Fallujah, launched on April 5, a representative of the Iraqi Governing Council at the talks said.

"We have a mechanism for that, and when we conclude our talks we will announce that," Hashem al-Hassani told reporters after six hours of negotiations ended.

Skirmishes continue outside Najaf

In the south, U.S. troops skirmished for a second day with militiamen loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. His aides said Iraqi-led mediation aimed at resolving a standoff with the Americans had broken down.

Militiamen attacked two U.S. Humvees outside Najaf, sparking a battle, witnesses said. Al-Sadr loyalists also fired mortars at the Spanish army base in the city, but there were no reported casualties.

U.S. commanders have said they have no plans for the time being to enter Najaf — Iraq's holiest Shiite city — where al-Sadr's office is located. Some 2,500 U.S. troops deployed this week around Najaf on a mission to kill or capture the cleric.

A top al-Sadr aide, Jabir al-Khafaji, said mediations by Iraqi politicians had ended because of U.S. demands that the cleric's al-Mahdi Army militia be disbanded.

Compiled from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, The New York Times, The Associated Press and The Washington Post.

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