The American army said on Sunday its troops killed eight gunmen in the latest series of operations in western Iraq. 
The new operation involves some 1,000 soldiers and is designed to stop foreign fighters entering into Iraq from Syria.
In Karabila, US troops with loudspeakers warned locals to stay inside their homes for their own safety Sunday, witnesses said. In Rumana, a town on the other side of the Euphrates River, helicopters fired on several houses, the witnesses said. Resistance fighters hiding in houses fired sporadically on U.S. troops in the street from time to time.
Elsewhere, two Iraqis were killed Sunday in drive-by shootings - a businessman in Baghdad and Iraqi soldier in Karbala, 50 miles to the south, police said.
According to the AP, police also found the bodies of four Iraqis in three different areas of Baghdad on Sunday, with their hands tied behind their backs.
The U.S. Army reported that a 60-year-old Iraqi detainee who fell ill at Abu Ghraib prison died of a heart attack during surgery there.
Meanwhile, several mortar rounds landed near Iraq’s interior ministry on Sunday, but there were no casualties, police said, according to Reuters.
The mortar attack on the ministry building in central Baghdad came one day after the brother of Interior Minister Bayan Jabor was abducted. Police sources said Jabor’s brother was nabbed on Saturday near the Sadr City district in the east of the capital.
© 2005 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
