[Timber Loftis]

March 31, 2004
5 U.S. Soldiers Are Killed in Bomb Attack West of Baghdad
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 31 — In the deadliest day in weeks for coalition troops in Iraq, five American soldiers were killed today when a bomb exploded under their vehicle west of Baghdad today, the United States military said.

In a separate attack in Falluja, at least four non-Iraqis were killed and their bodies were beaten and burned, according to news agency reports. It was the single worst attack against non-military foreigners, whose nationalities were not immediately known, since the conflict began.

The attack on the American military vehicle occurred in Al Anbar province, a wellspring of resistance to occupation forces, said Sgt. James Oleen, a military spokesman in Baghdad. The military offered no further information on the incident.

Witnesses said the attack occurred in Malahma, 12 miles northwest of Falluja, The Associated Press reported.

In the other deadly attack, gunmen in Falluja attacked two civilian vehicles, killing their occupants and setting the cars on fire, The A.P. reported. Associated Press Television News captured images of a man beating a corpse with a metal pole and others dragging a second corpse down a street as crowds cheered, the news agency said.

After the attack on the foreigners this morning, residents told The A.P. that the burned cars contained weapons and that some of the bodies were dressed in flak jackets. The A.P. television network footage showed one American passport near a body and a United States Department of Defense identification card belonging to another man.

The series of deadly attacks on American troops and foreign civilians in the Sunni Triangle area of central Iraq, particularly around Falluja, and a similar spate of attacks in the northern oil city of Mosul, have raised doubts about the cautiously optimistic appraisal of American progress in the war that has been common among United States generals since the beginning of the year.

Military officials have said that the capture of Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13 and documents seized with him had allowed them to penetrate the cell structure of that part of the insurgency that sought to restore a "Saddamist" or Baathist government to Iraq, with the Sunni minority once again dominating the majority Shiites.

American generals have said that these breakthroughs had given them the upper hand in the battle against Saddam loyalists and created the conditions for the American occupation authority to move forward with confidence to the planned handover of sovereignty under an interim government on June 30 and to an elected government in January 2006.

At the same time, the generals have been saying that their main focus in the conflict has shifted to Islamic terrorists who they believe to have been responsible for many suicide bombings and other attacks on the Iraqi police, civilians and foreigners. These attacks, they say, have effectively carried the Iraqi conflict into a new landscape that makes the fighting here part of the worldwide war on terrorism.

But today's events at Falluja suggested that the war may not have changed as much as the generals have suggested

The fact that the attack on the civilian vehicles occurred in Falluja, an overwhelming Sunni city that is the most volatile stronghold of support for Mr. Hussein, and that it followed a 10-day offensive by United States marines aimed at gaining effective control of the city, suggested that the current war may, in practice, be an extension of the conflict that began last year.

In a modulation of their assessments in recent days, the generals had begun to say that there may be a merging of diehard loyalists to Mr. Hussein and Islamic militants, with the two groups at least loosely coordinating their attacks.

On Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for the American command, who had previously emphasized the growing role of Islamic terrorists in the conflict, said at a news conference that the military no longer considered the distinction between Saddam loyalists and militant Islamists to be so significant from the viewpoint of military operations.

"I'm not sure trying to over-classify these different groups is helpful," he said. "It might help somehow in the intelligence community, in terms of trying to find out where they come from and trying to find some trails onto them. But on the operations side we just call them targets."
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