BAGHDAD — Five U.S. soldiers died in a roadside bomb blast Monday as fighting raged in Mosul, a northern city identified by Iraqi and American officials as a key hub for Sunni militants.
Soon after the troops' vehicle blew up, unidentified men in a Mosul mosque sprayed gunfire at the rest of the unit, which returned fire, the U.S. Army said in a statement.
Iraqi soldiers stormed the mosque, but the gunmen had fled, according to the statement. The battle lasted nearly an hour, police said. At least 3,940 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since 2003, according to icasualties.org, a website that keeps an unofficial tally of American military deaths.
Thirty-six U.S. soldiers have died this month, up from 23 in December, but still a major decline from the first half of 2007, when more than 100 deaths were recorded monthly from April through June. Six of those killed this month died in a booby-trapped house in Diyala province, northeast of the capital.
U.S. and Iraqi officials have called Mosul the last urban bastion of Al Qaeda in Iraq after largely quelling violence from the group in Baghdad and the Anbar and Diyala provinces. In November 2004, Sunni Arab insurgents briefly overran the northern city. Many veterans of the late dictator Saddam Hussein's army reside in Mosul and are believed to have lent their expertise to Sunni fighters opposed to the new U.S.-backed government.
U.S. military spokesman Rear Adm. Greg Smith on Jan. 20 labeled Mosul the one Iraqi city that remains "a center of influence" for Sunni radicals. Three thousand U.S. troops are stationed in the region around Mosul, which is home to 1.7 million people and is fraught with tensions between Arabs and Kurds.
"Mosul was used for a long time as a hub between the Syrian borders and the rest of Iraq. It is also a province with a contentious ethnic fault line with the Kurdistan regional government," said Iraq's national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie.
Additional Iraqi tanks and aircraft arrived in Mosul on Sunday as Iraqi officials vowed to root out Al Qaeda in Iraq after a booby-trapped building exploded Wednesday. Initial reports said 34 people died in the blast, but an Iraqi Red Crescent Organization report released over the weekend said 60 had been killed. A suicide bomber killed the police chief of Nineveh province Thursday.
