Overnight, a mortar killed seven members of a family in Baghdad as they slept on their roof, police said. Constant power outages force Iraqis to often sleep on the roof of their homes to try and escape sweltering summer temperatures inside.
The military said four occupation soldiers were killed by roadside bombs in Baghdad, three on Friday and one on Thursday, and that two Marines were killed in combat in the western Anbar province on Thursday.
U.S. casualties have risen sharply in the past few months with tens of thousands of troops on the offensive in operations designed to stop Iraq plunging into all-out civil war between majority Shi'ite Muslims and minority Sunni Arabs.
This has put U.S. President George W. Bush under mounting pressure from opposition Democrats and increasingly from senior figures in his own Republican Party to show his war strategy is working after ordering 28,000 more troops to Iraq. There are now 157,000 U.S. military personnel in the country.
The April-June period was the deadliest three months for U.S. troops since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion. So far this month 20 soldiers have been killed, half of them in Baghdad.
Nearly 3,600 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the conflict according to US.
Source: Reuters
Kavkaz Center
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