6 Us Servicemen Reported Dead In Iraq

6 US Servicemen Reported Dead in Iraq, 11 Iraqis

Monday’s toll (still incomplete but more complete than any one article I saw in any one language):

Guerrillas sent a videotape to Associated Press with views of four US Marines lying dead in a walled compound in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The bodies appear to have been looted. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt confirmed the deaths.

Regarding these four Marines killed in Ramadi, according to the US military spokesman, “Four US Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were killed on the 21st of June in the Al-Anbar province conducting security and stability operations.”

In Baghdad, guerrillas launched a mortar attack that killed one US soldier and wounded 7 others, according to AP.

At 9:35 am in al-Qayyara near Mosul in the north, a roadside bomb killed 5 Iraqi contractors who were apparently with a US military convoy at the time.

Also in the north, just south of Kirkuk, Arab and Turkmen militias fought a half-hour gunbattle with one another, leaving one dead on each side, at Majma` al-Nahrawan. (This according to al-Hayat. Most Arabs in that area had been settled there by Saddam Hussein in an attempt to Arabize the north, and to marginalize the Kurds and Turkmen who predominated there. Now the latter are returning to their homes and taking back their property, and 10,000 Arabs are said to have been expelled. The local police chief confirmed that the fight was over land occupied by immigrant Arabs, the original ownership of which the Turkmen claim. The incident is more evidence that the Kirkuk region, with its Turkmen, Kurdish and Arab populations, is highly volatile. Arabs and Kurds have clashed. Shiite Turkmen and Sunni Kurds have clashed. And now Arabs and Turkmen are fighting. So far only the Christians and Yazidis haven’t fielded militias, and even the Christians are demanding a semi-autonomous zone in Ninevah province.

A huge gang of 50 masked Iraqi guerrillas, among the largest paramilitary forces that has operated in the Sunni areas aside from the siege of Fallujah, blew up a police station at Jurf al-Sakar, south of Baghdad. Kimmitt reported, “Approximately 50 armed insurgents wearing black masks dismounted their vehicle by the Iraqi police station in Djor Askar. . . When coalition and Iraqi security forces approached the station, they saw five vehicles matching the description of the attackers. Forces engaged and destroyed one of the vehicles and pursued another vehicle to a residence, where they found a wounded attacker, an AK-47 shotgun and blueprints of the police station.”

In Samawah in the south, guerrillas fired mortar rounds at a Coalition base, wounding one person, and four guerrillas were killed by return fire. Guerrillas that far south are likely to be either Mahdi Army, Marsh Arab Hizbullah, or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

A US soldier wounded at Buhriz near Baquba on Friday died and his death was reported on Monday.

Corrected 6/22 at 9:33 pm; sorry I misread the al-Anbar report as distinct from the Ramadi one and so double-counted.