6 Us Troops Wounded More Than 28

6 US Troops Wounded, More than 28 Iraqis Dead, Over 50 Wounded

On Saturday, Alistair Lyon reported from Baghdad along with David Randall in London that guerrillas wounded 6 US troops; killed at least 24 Iraqi security men and wounded dozens of Iraqi police and national guardsmen; and killed 4 civilians.

Early on Saturday a suicide bomber crashed into an Iraqi police post outside a US Marine base at the small town of Baghadi, 142 miles west of the capital, Baghdad, killing 16 Iraqi policemen and wounding 40 others.

On the road out to the airport from Baghdad, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb as a Bradley Fighting vehicle passed, wounding 6 US soldiers.

In downtown Baghdad, guerrillas fired two mortar rounds. They killed two Iraqi civilians and injured another.

In the village of Ishaqi near Samarra, another suicide bomber set off his payload near a checkpoint maintained by Iraqi National Guards, klling 4 and wounding 6. Guerrillas in Samarra itself set off a roadside bomb, killing two more Iraqi policemen.

Guerrillas near Mosul attacked a Turkish truck convoy, killing two drivers and injuring two other Turks.

Gunmen assassinated the chief of the military police (“police guards”) in Irbil, Col. Taha Ahmad, 51. Conflicts among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in the far north make it difficult to know who exactly was behind such an assassination (-AS).

Al-Hayat is giving the number killed on Saturday as 50, nearly twice the figures in the early Western wire service reports.

Guerrillas bombed the Khana pipeline northeast of Baghdad, setting it ablaze and damaging 150 yards of it. The pipeline pumps crude petroleum to the Dora refinery at Baghdad, so that this sabotage directly harms Iraq’s ability to provide fuel oil and gasoline to citizens.

Guerrillas in Mushahadah, a half-hour drive to the north of Baghdad, also bombed an oil pipeline feeding the Dora refinery.

In Baqubah, an attempt to bomb a pipeline going to Dora was foiled, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat, so it is pretty obvious that there was a coordinated campaign of sabotage directed at Dora on Saturday.

US forces continued to attack Fallujah, and in a raid captured an emerging leader of the Monotheism and Holy War terrorist organization, along with five others.