Guerrillas killed two US soldiers and wounded a third in an ambush in western Iraq, a military statement said yesterday. A day earlier, seven Spanish intelligence agents and two Japanese diplomats died in separate attacks near Baghdad.
With the latest deaths, guerrillas have killed 106 coalition troops in Iraq in November, with 81 American soldiers slain along with 25 other allied soldiers. In terms of coalition losses, it has been the bloodiest month of the war that began March 20.
A military statement said the US troops were killed when a task force from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was hit Saturday by rocket-propelled grenades and automatic fire east of the border town of Husaybah, 300km northwest of Baghdad.
In Mahmudiyah, 29km south of Baghdad, assailants ambushed a team of Spanish military intelligence officers Saturday, killing seven agents. One Spaniard escaped the assault.
Television footage of the aftermath of the ambush showed several bodies along a highway as cars, their headlights on, drove by at dusk. People milled around, and a young man -- apparently aware he was being filmed -- kicked his foot in the air over a body. Another rested his foot on a corpse, an arm raised in triumph.
"We sacrifice our souls and blood for you, oh Saddam," some in the group chanted in Arabic, witnesses said.
On Sunday, witnesses at the scene, about 50km south of Baghdad, said the Spaniards had been traveling in a pair of sport utility vehicles when men in a car behind them opened fire. One of the SUVs careened off the road into a ditch.
The occupants fled the car and were shot at the roadside, perhaps by a second group of attackers involved in the ambush. On Sunday, the charred remains of the car could be seen in a watery ditch at the side of the road, with a group of villagers scavenging its parts.
Witnesses said the four men in the second car were also killed at the side of the road, apparently by a grenade. Blood could be seen on bushes nearby, and a broken pair of glasses lay on the road.
"All of them are Jews," said 15-year-old Tareq Jassim, a villager at the scene yesterday. "All of them are occupiers."
Spanish defense minister Federico Trillo arrived in Kuwait yesterday to repatriate the bodies, which were flown to Kuwait's International Airport aboard a C-130 Hercules transport, officials in Madrid said.
The two Japanese diplomats were killed by unidentified gunmen Saturday as they stopped to buy food and drinks at a stand outside the village of Mukayshifa on the road between Baghdad and Tikrit, Lieutenant Colonel William MacDonald said yesterday.
The diplomats, on their way to attend a reconstruction conference, were not traveling with a military escort, MacDonald said. Their Iraqi driver was also reported killed in the incident.
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