BAGHDAD - Insurgents killed five US soldiers in a Baghdad ambush on Friday as the military said it had detained dozens of suspected Al-Qaeda linked militants in raids across Iraq.
The soldiers were killed, and seven more wounded, in southern Baghdad on Thursday when insurgents detonated a roadside bomb against their patrol and then opened fire on it, the military said on Friday.
One of the wounded soldiers has since returned to duty but six more were still receiving treatment, the military said.
The latest fatalities took US losses in Iraq to 82 this month alone and to 3,559 since the March 2003 invasion, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
In May, 121 US soldiers were killed, making that month the deadliest since November 2004, when US marines stormed the former rebel town of Fallujah.
Meanwhile the US military said it killed three Al-Qaeda militants and detained dozens of other suspects in the Friday raids.
One of those killed was wearing a suicide vest and was shot near Fallujah in the western Sunni Anbar province during a raid that netted 16 suspects with alleged ties to a "top Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader."
US and Iraqi forces arrested another four people in the nearby town of Karmah, while several more suspects were seized in other operations, the military said.
Insurgents, meanwhile, bombed an oil pipeline south of Baghdad on Friday, setting it ablaze, a local police officer told AFP.
Police Lieutenant Mohammed Hussaini said the bomb was placed under the pipeline in an area called Mowelha, near the town of Iskandiriyah, 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of the Iraqi capital.
The pipeline transports crude oil to Baghdad's Dura electricity plant and to a power station in the town of Musayyib, south of the capital, he added.
Two more people, including a policeman, were killed in other attacks on Friday, and several mortars arched across central Baghdad. No details of casualties were immediately available.
Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, meanwhile, was reportedly considering calling an end to his political bloc's boycott of the Iraqi parliament, according to a senior Shiite lawmaker who visited him in the holy city of Najaf.
"Moqtada al-Sadr told me that he is considering this and I hope he takes a decision by Tuesday," acting assembly speaker Khalid al-Attiyah told reporters.
The 32-member bloc quit the 275-member parliament on June 13 to protest the bombing of the revered Shiite Al-Askari shrine in the northern town of Samarra.
On Friday, Sadr postponed a march by his followers to Samarra to protest the destruction of the shrine, a top aide said during Friday prayers.
Assad al-Nasiri, a Shiite imam and Sadr loyalist speaking from the cleric's pulpit in the town of Kufa, said that the government's refusal to secure the route to Samarra was one of the reasons for the postponement.
"Sayyid Sadr has decided to postpone a visit to Samarra and to hold off for several reasons, firstly because the government has gone back on its promises, including the commitment to protect the road to Samarra," he said.
Nasiri added that Sadr had received several appeals from various political leaders asking him to postpone the march through staunchly Sunni territory.
The Al-Askari shrine, deeply revered by Shiites around the world, was first bombed in February 2006 and then on June 13. Sadr has blamed the Iraqi government for not securing the site and for failing to rebuild it.
After the first attack in which the shrine's golden dome was destroyed, a rampage of Shiite and Sunni killings broke out across Iraq, which continues to this day and has caused tens of thousands of deaths.
06/29/2007