American and Iraqi troops repelled a series of coordinated "insurgent" attacks in southern Baghdad, killing six "rebels" and capturing 12, the U.S. military said Saturday. The clashes started about 8 p.m. Friday when gunmen attacked an Iraqi army position with mortar rounds and small-arms fire, the US command said.
At nearly the same time, a suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into a nearby Iraqi army checkpoint, killing an Iraqi soldier.
A suicide car bomber tried to attack another Iraqi position in the area, but a U.S. tank fired and hit the car, killing the driver and causing the car bomb to explode prematurely, the U.S. command said. Iraqi police said three bystanders were injured.
Minutes later, resistance fighters at a fourth location fired two rocket-propelled grenades and a mortar round at another Iraqi army post in south Baghdad.
Separately, the U.S. command said an American soldier assigned to a unit in the northern city of Mosul died Thursday "during a terrorist attack" there.
In a statement Saturday, al-Qaeda in Iraq warned Sunnis that voting in the Oct. 15 referendum on the new Iraqi charter was tantamount to rejecting Islam. The statement added that supporting the constitution was no less than abandoning Islam and that "voting for the constitution is tantamount to raising the flag of the crusaders on the land.''
"Drafting the constitution means believing that the religion of Islam is incomplete,'' the statement said. "Those who call on you to participate in the constitution vote have not accepted Islam as a religion.''
