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United States warplanes dropped 18 tonnes of bombs on more than 40 targets on Baghdad's southern outskirts last night in a major strike on al Qaeda targets.
The US Air Force dispatched two B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets, aiming at three large target areas in Arab Jabour, an area of date palm groves that has become a haven for al Qaeda fighters.
Six United States soldiers were killed earlier when a house rigged with explosives blew up north of Baghdad during the new US-Iraqi offensive targeting al Qaeda guerrillas.
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.
The military 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 offensive.
The commander of US forces in northern Iraq, Major-General Mark Hertling, said 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.
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 security patrols which US forces pay to guard neighbourhoods. Hertling said five severed heads had been found in Diyala with warnings in Arabic written in blood on their foreheads that all volunteers would share their fate.
- REUTERS
