Two U.S. soldiers killed, Iraqi Council says attackers from neighboring states
Two American soldiers were killed and a third was wounded in a bomb explosion that targeted their military vehicle to the north of Baghdad, according to a spokesman for the US fourth army contingent.
By the killing of the two said soldiers, the number of killed Americans in Iraq increased to 116 soldiers, thereby surpassing the total number of Americans who were killed in the main battle to occupy Iraq where 115 soldiers were killed.
As for the British army, 8 of them were killed in fighting operations during the war against 11 killed after the end of main military operations. Other 25 British soldiers were killed away from fighting operations during the wars. Two other soldiers from other countries were killed for non- fighting reasons after the end of the main military operations.
Meantime, four persons were killed at least and others wounded in a booby trapped car explosion near the police center in al-Falouja city to the west of Baghdad. An Iraqi security source said that the killings are civilians including school students.
The American occupation forces in Iraq released al-Jazeera photographer Samer Hamzeh and a driver working in al-Jazeera office in Baghdad, Rasheed Wali, three days after their detention. The US forces detained the two men while covering the incident of the explosion of a booby trapped car in al-Khadra area to the west of Baghdad, where they had arrived half an hour after the explosion.
Meantime, the US President said that his administration is working with each of Syria and Iran to tighten control on their borders with Iraq and that he expects the two countries to halt the sneaking of what he described as terrorists. He noted the need of accelerating the pace of training the Iraqis to assume the mission of protecting their country's borders as soon as possible.
However, the Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi said that the recent explosions which took place in Iraq are serious and are made by persons who want continued American occupation (by providing the US pretext to stay), and called on the UN to play its due role in this country to to assign the Iraqis to run their own affairs.
Syria, meanwhile, condemned the attack at the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross ( ICRC) and considered it as "a terrorist act which inflicts damage on the Iraqi people."