August 10: One Day of Iraq

A Day of Iraq in Pictures: (click on pic to enlarge)


One Day In Iraq In Words:

• Four soldiers operating with a New York-based Army National Guard division were killed Tuesday, and five soldiers and an American military contractor were wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol near Baiji, in northern Iraq, the American military said Wednesday.

• A member of the Second Marine Division was killed Tuesday by small arms fire while on patrol near Habbaniya, a predominantly Sunni town west of Falluja, in Anbar Province, a redoubt for the insurgency.

• A roadside bomb struck the American patrol in Baiji, an oil refining town, while it was investigating an earlier explosion in the area, said Sgt. First Class David Rhodes, a spokesman for the 42nd Infantry Division. The division has been overseeing security in four northern provinces since February.

• As soldiers tended to the casualties, the patrol came under attack by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, the spokesman said. The contractor wounded in the attack was a dog handler, he said; dogs are often used by the military to detect explosives.

• A high-ranking official in Iraq's Interior Ministry was kidnapped Wednesday in a predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood of northern Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. Brig. Gen. Khudayer Abbas, who was also the security adviser to Ayad Allawi when he was prime minister, was kidnapped after leaving the offices of Mr. Allawi's political party in Adamiya.

• In a village northwest of Kirkuk, gunmen opened fire on a surveying team that was delineating parcels of land to give to returning Kurds who had been deported from the area under Saddam Hussein's government, a Kirkuk police official said. The gunmen had killed a surveyor and wounded three others in a predominantly Arab village 22 miles from Kirkuk. Iraqi troops responded, and in an ensuing gun battle, one Iraqi soldier died and another was wounded. An American military unit encircled the village and began a door-to-door sweep, he said.

• In the Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, a suicide car bomber blew himself up next to a patrol of Iraqi police officers, killing 2 officers and 4 civilians, and wounding 2 other officers and 14 civilians, an Interior Ministry official reported.

• Insurgents also fired a mortar round into Antar Square in Adamiya, the same Baghdad neighborhood where the ministry official was kidnapped, killing a traffic policeman and wounding seven other people, the ministry aide said.

• The Iraqi Ministry of Defense announced Wednesday that security forces had discovered and defused a car bomb in the upscale Mansur neighborhood of Baghdad.

• The American command said it had concluded a weeklong offensive in the Euphrates River corridor in Anbar Province, where insurgents last week carried out a series of attacks against American forces, including two ambushes that killed 20 marines. But the results of the effort to choke off insurgent strongholds and supply corridors appeared modest, according to the final scorecard posted by the military: Soldiers discovered 9 vehicle bombs, 6 of them in a garage apparently used for rigging such weapons, and 28 improvised bombs planted on the side of roads or near buildings. The troops also detained 36 suspected insurgents for questioning, the military said.
  

One Day. That is JUST one day. One day of WAR. Are Americans aware of how much violence occurs in this war each day? I don't think so. Does our media convey to us the daily violence and pain that is Iraq? No they most certainly do not.