A roadside bomb hit a U.S. military convoy on a highway to Baghdad Friday. An Associated Press Television News footage from the scene showed a Humvee, its hood open, consumed in flames. A U.S. soldier was killed Friday and four others injured by a car bomb in central Iraq, the military said. The explosion occurred in Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad.
Before this death, five American troops died in Iraq, two during an offensive near the Syrian border on Wednesday and three others when their convoys hit roadside bombs Thursday in Baghdad and surrounding areas, the U.S. military announced Friday.
Elsewhere, snipers opened fired on the motorcade of the Interior Ministry's undersecretary, Maj. Gen. Hikmat Moussa Hussein, in western Baghdad, killing one of his guards and wounding three others, police Maj. Moussa Abdul Karim said. Also in western Baghdad, a 30-minute gunbattle erupted when gunmen fired on an Iraqi police patrol, killing one officer and wounding three others, said police Lt. Firas Hamdan.
Gunmen also shot and killed Iraqi Army Maj. Murtadha Younis Hwesh in a drive-by attack in western Baghdad's al-Amil district, a Defense Ministry official said, according to <i>The AP</I>.
In Baqouba, car bomb blasts targeted Iraqi army patrols in separate attacks more than seven hours apart. Three people, including two soldiers, were killed and six wounded in the first attack, police said, while four soldiers sustained minor injuries in the second.
In Hillah, south of Baghdad, mortars slammed into an Iraqi army checkpoint, killing three soldiers and wounding three others, police said.
Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday that the anti-American attacks could last for many more years.
"This requires patience," he said at a news conference, according to The AP. "This is a thinking and adapting adversary ... I wouldn't look for results tomorrow. One thing we know about insurgencies, that they last from three, four years to nine years."
"What we're seeing is really an attempt to discredit this new cabinet and new government," Myers added. "This is, the most cases, Iraqis blowing up other Iraqis. And I don't how they expect to curry favor with the Iraq population when we have Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence."
