2 Us Soldiers Wounded 3 Iraqi Police

2 US Soldiers Wounded; 3 Iraqi police Killed by US Troops

According to MSNBC, attacks on US forces and Iraqi police in the past few days have killed more than dozen persons in the Sunni Arab heartland. On Friday morning, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb northwest of Baghdad, wounding two US soldiers, according to Capt. Tammy Galloway of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.

On Friday night or early Saturday morning, US troops near to Kirkuk accidentally killed three Iraqi policemen whom they mistook for guerrillas. Second Lieutenant Salam Zankana said, according to wire services, “The police had a roadblock on the road linking Kirkuk and Baghdad. An America patrol arrived around 0200 (2300 GMT Friday) and opened fire, taking the police to be guerrillas.”

The gasoline shortage in Baghdad has reached worrisome proportions. It is apparently common to wait 12 hours to get gasoline, sitting in lines of cars that seem to go on for miles. Part of the problem is that some gasoline is smuggled out of the country by the guerrillas to finance their insurgency, apparently. The US arrested 20 suspected smugglers and confiscated 28 gasoline tankers on Friday. The smuggling makes sense, since the local price of gasoline is only 5 US cents a gallon, far less than the world market value.

Basra exploded in violence in August because of citizens’ frustration with lack of fuel and services.