Insurgents have killed four American soldiers and two Iraqis in a spate of attacks, including the bombing of a US military convoy near Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone, officials said on Wednesday.
US military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith warned that while violence levels had dropped in and around Baghdad due to extensive operations by Iraqi and American forces, "the process is fragile and far from irrreversible."
"The enemy still has both the will and the capacity to cause significant loss of life and damage to property," he told reporters hours after the relative calm of Baghdad of recent weeks was shattered by the powerful roadside bomb. Iraqi security officials said the blast near a police post just outside the Green Zone killed two Iraqi civilians and wounded three.
Smith told AFP that there was "at least one US fatality" in the attack. An AFP correspondent at the site said a heavily armoured Stryker vehicle of the US military was badly damaged in the blast, which sent a thick plume of smoke into the sky.
The attack took place around 8:10 am (0510 GMT) as Iraqi officials and politicians were converging on the Green Zone for a conference on the reconstruction of war-torn Iraq.
Comments
Comments are closed.