Six National Guardsmen were killed on Sunday in an attack on a checkpoint north-east of the Iraqi capital by unknown gunmen armed with anti-tank rockets, a provincial police chief said.
"The attack was launched shortly after 5:00pm by armed men on a National Guard checkpoint at Jalawla," some 180 kilometres from Baghdad, said General Walid Khaled Abdul Salam, chief of Diyala province.
"The assailants attacked the position using anti-tank rockets and automatic weapons, killing six members of the National Guard and wounding four others," he told AFP.
"One of the assailants, who were in a car, was killed in the exchange of fire and the others fled," said the Diyala police chief, without giving the number of attackers.
Two Iraqi children were killed and eight wounded on Sunday in a mortar strike on the Tigris river bank near Baghdad's Sheraton Hotel, popular with Western media and businessmen, a local hospital said.
Earlier, a policeman at the site of the attack had said five people were killed by two mortars as they had just finished wading in the Tigris.
But a doctor at Al-Kindi hospital corrected the officer's toll and his account of the incident.
The group of boys and young men had been playing football when two mortars burst, sending shrapnel flying, and killed two of them, said Dr Walid Hamid.
"Two children were killed and eight wounded, three of them seriously," Hamid told AFP.
"They were playing football along the river and Abu Nawas street. We don't know who fired the two mortars," Jassem said.
Blood stained the eastern bank of the Tigris river. The projectiles had gouged a hole in the dirt.
The mortar strike was the source of two loud blasts that shook central Baghdad at 7:05pm.
A US soldier was killed in a rocket attack on a US-led coalition base in Baghdad on Sunday, the military said.
"One US soldier was killed in a rocket attack on a coalition base here around 3:00pm," the military said in a statement.
A US C-130 transport plane was hit by gunfire after takeoff from Baghdad airport on Sunday and one person aboard was fatally wounded, the US army said.
"While there was no significant damage to the aircraft, one person was wounded which caused the aircraft to divert back to Baghdad International Airport for medical treatment," US spokesman Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said in a statement. "The individual later died."
The attack marked the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein that guerrillas have mounted a deadly attack on a fixed wing plane taking off from or landing at Baghdad's airport.
In January a US Air Force C-5 cargo jet carrying 63 passengers and crew was hit by ground fire and made a safe emergency landing.
Last year a DHL cargo plane also made an emergency landing after being hit by ground fire.
Comments
Comments are closed.