Iraq tribe says it kills dozens of Qaeda fighters

Iraqi tribesmen have killed 55 al Qaeda fighters in a raid on their stronghold, the head of a tribal council in the western province of Anbar said on Sunday, but the US military could not confirm the figures.
The death toll from Saturday night's fighting, if confirmed, would mark an unusually fierce clash with insurgents in a province where US forces regularly battle foreign fighters they say are linked to al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgents and rarely kill as many as 50 at a time.
The US military said in a statement it launched air strikes and fired artillery to help a tribe in the town of Sofia after an attack by al Qaeda.
"Al Qaeda burned homes and killed members of the tribe using small arms fire and mortars," the military said in a statement. It gave no casualty figures.
Sattar al-Buzayi, head of the Anbar Salvation Council, an umbrella group of tribes in Anbar, a vast Sunni province in the west of Iraq, said tribal fighters had raided an al Qaeda stronghold and killed 55 militants and arrested 25. He said nine tribal fighters were also killed in the clash.
"We began the raid after we had successfully cornered them, we can confirm that 10 (foreign) Arab fighters were among the dead and we found several cars rigged with explosives," Buzayi told Reuters.
The Anbar Salvation Council was formed two months ago by many of Anbar's tribal leaders frustrated with al Qaeda's growing influence in the violent desert province.
One of Iraq's top Sunni clerics, for whom an arrest warrant was issued recently for inciting violence, recently criticised the tribes fighting al Qaeda militants. Harith al-Dari labelled the tribes "bandits" who were fighting against the "resistance".
The US statement quoted a tribal leader called Sheikh Ahmed of Abu Resha as saying his tribe had been targeted because it provided recruits to serve in the police force.
"Al Qaeda has decided to attack the tribes due to their support. The terrorists have gone to a neighbouring tribe and have brought fighters to attack the Abu Soda (tribe)," the statement quoted him as saying.