Baghdad was again rocked by violence on Saturday as insurgents launched an assault on a police station and four civil servants were assassinated, while US and Iraqi troops took the battle against insurgents from Fallujah to Mosul. But a Polish woman kidnapped in Iraq more than three weeks ago was back in Warsaw on Saturday after her captors released her.
Teresa Borcz-Halifa, 54, married to an Iraqi and resident in Iraq for 30 years, told a press conference in Warsaw that the men who kidnapped her from her home on October 28 had treated her well but gave no details on the circumstances of her release.
Gunmen launched an assault on a police station in Baghdad's Adhamiya neighbourhood, a day after US and Iraqi troops rounded up more than 30 suspects following Friday prayers in one of Iraq's most important mosques.
One policeman was killed and another wounded in the attack, which saw US helicopters deployed in response, amid fears that insurgents who managed to flee the massive anti-insurgency operation in Fallujah were regrouping in Baghdad.
The group of al-Qaeda frontman in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - one of the main targets of the Fallujah campaign - claimed responsibility for the assault against the police in a statement posted on the Internet.
In a separate incident, a senior public works ministry official and four of her aides were gunned down in broad daylight as they were driving to work in Baghdad, a ministry spokesman said.
One US soldier was also killed and nine others wounded when their unit came under attack in central Baghdad, bringing to 1,214 the number of US troops killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.
Elsewhere in the capital at least one person was killed when a suicide bomber tried to attack a civilian convoy.
Meanwhile in Mosul, nine Iraqi soldiers were feared dead after US troops taking part in a major operation to root out the insurgency in the large northern city discovered bodies. Senior Iraqi and US military sources said they probably belonged to an Iraqi army unit that had joined US troops for the attack, which was launched more than a week after insurgents over-ran police stations in the city and torched other buildings.
At least 15 insurgents have been killed and 45 suspects detained over the last 24 hours while US-backed Iraqi commandos on Friday stormed a suspected insurgent position in Mosul's old city, a warren of cramped streets and crumbling houses. But US army commander Colonel Robert Brown said operations in Mosul would differ greatly from the ferocious attacks in Fallujah and Samarra.
In further unrest, five Iraqis were killed in violence in the city of Ramadi, to the west of Fallujah.
Violence has also raged north of Baghdad around the towns of Tikrit, Samarra and Baiji in recent days, while insurgents dynamited a key bridge and destroyed power lines in Latifiyah, a town which commands access to much of southern Iraq from Baghdad and has been dubbed "Fallujah's second head".
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