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Six United States soldiers were killed yesterday when a house rigged with explosives blew up north of Baghdad during a new US-Iraqi offensive targeting al Qaeda guerrillas, the US military said.
It was one of the highest daily death tolls for US troops in Iraq for months and followed the deaths of three soldiers in the operation a day earlier. More than 3900 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.
The military gave few details of the incident but said the six soldiers were killed by a "house-borne improvised explosive device" during operations in Diyala.
The three other soldiers were killed in Salahuddin province, also north of Baghdad, another target area of the new US-led offensive launched on Wednesday.
The commander of US forces in northern Iraq, Major-General Mark Hertling, told a news conference in Baghdad that 24,000 US troops and 50,000 Iraqi Army soldiers were participating in Operation Iron Harvest in four provinces north of the capital.
Hertling said the main northern effort was in Diyala. A brigade of about 5000 US troops and a division of Iraqis had launched assaults near Muqdadiya in a fertile part of the Diyala River valley.
US forces say al Qaeda Sunni Arab militants have regrouped in northern Diyala, Salahuddin and Nineveh provinces after being driven from western Anbar province and Baghdad.
Increasingly, strikes have hit volunteer security patrols, which US forces refer to as "concerned local citizens" and pay to guard neighbourhoods against al Qaeda.
Hertling said five severed heads had been found on a road in Diyala with warnings in Arabic written in blood on their foreheads that all volunteers would share their fate.
REUTERS
