SAMARRA, Iraq - Eighty-five suspected insurgents were killed in a 17-hour assault by Iraqi troops and US aircraft on a remote Baathist and Al-Qaeda training camp north of Baghdad, Iraqi commanders said Wednesday.
In the capital, Shiite political leaders said the parliament could convene Saturday to vote on Iraq's first elected post-Saddam Hussein government.
Elite interior ministry commandos, backed by US attack helicopters, destroyed an important training camp and safe house for insurgents and foreign fighters on Tuesday, said General Adnan Thabet, a senior ministry security advisor.
"The commandos killed 35 and US air raids killed 50. But no one was captured and many escaped by boat," Thabet told AFP by phone from Samarra.
"During the fight, 30 boats left."
The "terror camp", frequented by members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's branch of al-Qaeda, was built after the US offensive to retake the rebel enclave of Fallujah in November, Thabet said.
"They were Zarqawi followers and Baathists from the old military because they knew how to fight. They fought like old soldiers."
Besides Fallujah, where rebels had turned the entire town into one giant command centre before November, the only other known strike on a suspected rebel training camp was by US forces near Qaim on the Syrian border in June 2003.
"This was a serious military camp with a living section and guard posts," said a commando officer, named Jalil, who took part in the operation, the largest since the January 30 elections.
"We destroyed their boats and tents."
He said fighters had been using fishing boats to cross the vast man-made Tharthar Lake from tense Al-Anbar province to the west to the tiny village of Ain al-Hilwa on the border with Salaheddin province, another restive area.
Jalil said machine guns, rockets, arms and training manuals including ones on how to make roadside bombs were found at the camp along with fake identification cards, passports and documents that proved the presence of foreigners, long blamed by both US and Iraqi officials for the bulk of the insurgency.
He estimated that some 100 fighters might have been at the camp at the time of the attack.
Thabet said six commandos were killed and four wounded.
A US military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Goldenberger, confirmed the operation and said Apache attack and Kiowa Warrior reconaissance helicopters backed the commandos.
He said what started as an Iraqi mission quickly turned into a joint one after fighters opened fire on the some 240 members of the interior ministry's 1st Commando Battalion approaching the camp.
Leaflets posted Wednesday in Tikrit and nearby Ad-Dawr and signed by the so-called Secret Islamic Army, one of the main militant groups believed to be active in the area, said only 11 rebels were killed.
Further north and in another hotbed of the Sunni-led insurgency, the US military said Iraqi troops arrested 70 insurgents and seized weapons in one operation north of Mosul without giving details. A spokesman for the defense ministry in Baghdad spoke of 24 being arrested and 12 killed in the same area.
A suicide car bomb in Mosul hit a US military convoy, wounding two US and two Iraqi soldiers, the military said.
An 11-year-old girl was killed when a mortar round struck a school in Amariyah, west of the capital, said medical sources. Another girl was wounded.
And five bodies, all shot in the head except for the corpse of a female university student who had her jaw slit with a knife, were found in farmland near Suwaira, 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of the capital, said police Lieutenant Colonel Khalil Obeid.
On the political front, Iraq's election-winning Shiite list said it was pushing for Iraq's parliament to meet Saturday.
"We may convene (parliament) on Saturday," said politician Ali al-Dabbagh, after a closed-door three-hour session of the United Iraqi Alliance.
Dabbagh said the UIA was awaiting a response from the Kurdistan Alliance, its main partner in a potential coalition government, and the runner up in the elections.
He said he expected the sides to meet Thursday and take a decision on when the parliament will hold its second session and nominate its speaker and the country's president.
The long-deprived Shiite community will take 16 to 17 ministries, the Kurds seven to eight and the Sunni minority four to six, according to UIA members. The Christian and Turkmen minorities will receive one post each.
Kurdish sources gave nearly matching accounts of the new government's shape, although they suggested parliament might not convene until next week.
Both Shiites and Kurds are keen to ensure a role for Sunnis, who have largely powered the insurgency and who widely boycotted the elections.
Dabbagh said the post of defense minister would go to either a Sunni or Kurd, but it has not yet been decided.

03/23/2005 18:06 GMT