Agence France-Presse,
Scores of Al-Qaeda fighters raided an Iraqi town on Thursday, clashing with rival militants and police after killing a tribal sheikh in fighting that left 23 people dead and 15 others kidnapped.
Brigadier General Ali Dalayan, police chief of Diyala's provincial capital of Baquba, said more than 200 fighters from Al-Qaeda's Iraq affiliate attacked a mosque and the homes of tribal Sunni sheikhs in the town of Kanan.
“The first attack was against a mosque,” he told AFP. “They blew up the mosque, then they bombed houses crowded with family members.”
Three houses were attacked, including those of two sheikhs who support Iraqi police and US troops in their fight against Al-Qaeda, he said.
“Sheikh Yunis al-Tae was killed in the attack” along with an unknown number of his sons in one of the homes, Dalayan said.
Police countered with the support of gunmen from the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution, a Sunni insurgent group once allied with Al-Qaeda but now one of its fiercest rivals.
He was not immediately able to say how many people died in the raids and how many in the ensuing gunbattle. At least one police officer was among the dead.
Dalayan said police had chased the attackers but had had a “difficult time as they planted roadside bombs around the town before escaping.”
“We have arrested 22 Al-Qaeda suspects,” he said. They were detained south of Kanan, 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Baghdad, in an area known to be a stronghold of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
He said the attackers managed to abduct eight women and seven children.
The raid on Kanan came despite a massive military crackdown in Diyala by some 16,000 US and Iraqi troops who claimed success in their assault.
The US military said the 12-day Operation Lightning Hammer ended Thursday successfully, with around 26 Al-Qaeda fighters killed and 50 villages cleared.
It said more than “80 tribal leaders and representatives” vowed to “unite in their fight against terrorists and become one tribe of Diyala.”
“We have continued to diminish their (Al-Qaeda) supplies and disable Al-Qaeda's abilities to disrupt the population,” the statement quoted Colonel David Sutherland, commander of US forces in Diyala, as saying.
He said that while not many militants were nabbed, the operation “proved to be a great success because we disrupted Al-Qaeda, causing them to run.”
“Their fear of facing our forces proves that the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them in Diyala. And though this specific operation is over, our fight is not over,” he said in a statement.
The US military blames the group for much of the violence besetting Iraq.
In recent months Al-Qaeda has begun attacking the increasing number of Sunni Arab tribesmen who support US-led forces in fighting the militants.
Meanwhile, gunmen shot dead Khalid Othman, media spokesman for the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party of Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
The attackers riddled Othman's car with bullets which also wounded his driver, said Brigadier General Abdul Karim Khalaf al-Juburi of Mosul police.
In another incident, a roadside bomb killed one civilian in Baghdad's Jadida neighbourhood, security officials said.
Also in Baghdad, an explosion rocked the heavily fortified Green Zone early Thursday but there were no casualties, a US embassy official said.
The Green Zone, a walled-in city district, houses the Iraqi parliament, the US and British embassies and several other foreign missions.
The US military announced Thursday that one of its soldiers was killed and four wounded in a roadside bomb explosion west of Baghdad the previous day.
The latest fatality took the military's losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,721, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
The military also said two suicide car bombers attacked a US-led forces outpost in northern Baghdad on Wednesday, killing four Iraqi soldiers and wounding 11 American troops and four Iraqi soldiers.
The exact location of the outpost was not revealed.
On Wednesday, 14 American soldiers died when their Blackhawk helicopter crashed in northern Iraq. The accident was one of the worst suffered by the military in more than four years of conflict in Iraq.
