“U.S. Kills 75 Insurgents in Iraqi Offensive,” from Fox News, with thanks to Jihad Watch News Editor Rebecca Bynum:
BAGHDAD, Iraq “” American troops backed by helicopters and war planes have launched a major offensive against insurgents in a remote desert area near the Syrian border, and about 75 militants were killed in the first 24 hours, the U.S. military said.
Marines, sailors and soldiers from Regimental Combat Team 2, 2nd Marine Division, were conducting the offensive in an area north of the Euphrates River, in the al-Jazirah Desert, a known smuggling route and sanctuary for foreign insurgents, the military said….
The report, by a journalist embedded with the U.S. forces, said the offensive “was seeking to uproot a persistent insurgency in an area that American intelligence indicated has become a haven for foreign fighters flowing in from Syria.”
Some U.S. forces were north of the Euphrates, but most were stuck south of the waterway as engineers tried to build a pontoon bridge there Sunday, the Tribune said.
The report quoted some Marines as saying residents of one riverside town had turned off all their lights at night, apparently to warn neighboring towns of the approaching U.S. troops...
Violence continued Monday with at least three Iraqis killed in a suicide car bombing at police checkpoint at a busy Baghdad intersection, said police Maj. Mousa Abdul Karim. The dead included two policemen and a civilian. Six other policemen and three civilians were wounded, he said…
The worst of the weekend fighting occurred in Haditha, when insurgents occupied a civilian hospital and used gunfire, RPGs, a suicide car bomb and a roadside bomb to kill three U.S. Marines and a sailor, the military said.
On Monday, the U.S. military accused insurgents of using patients as human shields during the four-hour battle in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad, even after one of their bombs set fire to the hospital…