Four US military personnel killed in Iraq as base bombing probed

BAGHDAD, Dec 23 (AFP) - Three US marines and a soldier were killed in two attacks in Iraq Thursday as the US military investigated how a suicide bomber managed to penetrate an army base in an strike that killed 22 people.
The marines were killed while conducting security operations in the restive western Al-Anbar province, home to the former insurgency stronghold of Fallujah, where a few hundred residents entered the war-battered city for the first time since a massive US-led offensive against rebels in November.
In Baghdad, a roadside bomb claimed the life of a US soldier and wounded two others, while mortar attacks killed three civilians and one policeman.
The fresh US military casualties came amid a major review of base security operations following Tuesday's attack on an army dining hall in the northern city of Mosul.
The US military's second-in-command in Iraq, Lieutenant General Thomas Metz, ordered a special investigation of how an infiltrator managed to penetrate the heavily-guarded US military base.
"What's going to happen is there will now be an ... investigation. Full force protection will be one of many areas looked at," said spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan.
But he recognised the quandary of staving off attacks against US camps.
"It's virtually impossible to have a 100 percent solution. We don't have a force field around our bases," he said.
General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that the attack was probably the work of a suicide bomber.
The bomber was probably wearing an Iraqi Army uniform, US Brigadier General Carter Ham, commander of the Mosul base where the attack occurred, told CNN.
An Al-Qaeda linked militant group, Ansar al-Sunna, which said it was a suicide bombing, claimed responsibility for the deadliest attack ever against the Americans in Iraq.
The strike was the second major bombing inside a citadel-like US base in two months after a double suicide blast in Baghdad's Green Zone, home to the US embassy and Iraqi government, that killed six in October.
Mosul, the third largest Iraqi city, was once seen as relatively stable compared with the restive areas around Baghdad, but the situation has deteriorated over the last year.
Last month, the city burst into outright war between the Americans and insurgents when rebels over-ran police stations.
Meanwhile, a few hundred men returned to their homes in Fallujah Thursday, nervous about what they would find in the ghost town of rubble after six weeks of fighting between the US military and insurgents.
The men, some dressed in suits, others in leather jackets and tribal robes, showed their passports and tattered identity papers to US soldiers and Iraqi national guard at a sand barrier checkpoint and then drove their cars inside.
The numbers were far smaller than the estimated 2,000 people who were expected to be the first ones to make their trip home after most fled the city of 300,000 on the advent of the US assault on the insurgent stronghold last month.
The marines estimated the turnout at only 200 to 300 people to the southwestern district of al-Andalus, which had been selected to pioneer the return of civilians to the dangerous city.
AFP correspondents on the fringes of Fallujah heard huge explosions and saw plumes of smoke rising from the direction of the city as about 100 people, some of them women, lined up at an Iraqi national guard checkpoint east of the city
Gilbert said insurgents attacked marines from a building in northern Fallujah prompting the military to call in aircraft that bombed and destroyed the building without providing further details.
Increasing violence has prompted calls for a postponement of the vote until a safer environment can be established.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, however, said in a Wall Street Journal editorial that "the vast majority of Iraqis are determined that the elections will go forward on time."
On January 30, Iraqis "will be presented with a unique opportunity to close a chapter of decades of tyrannical rule and take their first steps to shape their own future," he said.
But US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that it would be "a mistake" to think that deadly chaos in Iraq will subside after the polls.
Meanwhile freed French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot were debriefed in France by intelligence agents after four months in captivity at the hands of the Islamic Army in Iraq.
The pair had been seized on August 20 in an area south of Baghdad known as the "triangle of death" for its high rate of ambushes and kidnappings.
US marines arrested 44 suspected Iraqi insurgents in the treacherous area, after raids centered around the towns of Yusifiyah and Mahmudiyah, the scene of multiple shooting and kidnappings.
Police in Karbala meanwhile said they have arrested five Iraqis and a foreigner over Sunday's bombing at a bus station near a holy Muslim shrine that killed 14 people and wounded dozens more.

12/23/2004 18:25 GMT - AFP