Offensive targets Syrian border

BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a major offensive Saturday along a key part of the Syrian border to combat smuggling of foreign fighters and materials into Iraq and to lay the ground for national elections in six weeks, the U.S. military announced.

About 2,500 U.S. and 1,000 Iraqi troops were involved in the Steel Curtain offensive in and around Husaybah, a town of about 30,000 people on the Syrian border about 200 miles west of Baghdad. The U.S. military says the town is a primary transit point and staging area for al-Qaida in Iraq, the country’s main insurgent group, led by Jordanian Abu Musab Zaqarwi.

Residents of Husaybah reached by telephone said they were awakened at dawn by four large explosions, followed by announcements over loudspeakers atop U.S. military vehicles that they should immediately leave through the town’s northeast entrance. Dozens of families headed that way on foot under white flags, residents said.

A military spokesman said Saturday night that U.S. and Iraqi forces had encountered “sporadic resistance,” mostly roadside bombs and small-arms fire.

Residents said that Iraqi insurgents had taken up positions in previously dug trenches, while fighters from Saudi Arabi, Syria, Jordan and Egypt were engaging U.S. and Iraqi troops.

Local hospital officials said there were no immediate reports of casualties. There were no reports of U.S. or allied casualties, either, although the military often delays the release of such information for a day or longer.

A statement purportedly from al-Qaida in Iraq that was posted at a local mosque said the group would retaliate for the offensive in coordination with people in Baghdad and elsewhere.

In other violence Saturday, 11 people, including a 4-year-old boy, were killed at about 7:30 p.m. when gunmen sprayed their minivan with bullets in Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, police said.

The U.S. military reported that a soldier was killed by small-arms fire south of Baghdad and a Marine died when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb near Habbaniyah, about 50 miles west of the capital.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a senior U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the Steel Curtain offensive was part of a campaign now five months old to stop the infiltration of foreign fighters, money and weapons coming into Iraq from Syria along the Euphrates River valley, which stretches from the border almost to Baghdad.

Anbar province, where Husaybah is located, is one of the few Iraqi provinces where Sunni Arabs make up the majority of the population. It is the main center of the insurgency, and more than a third of all U.S. military fatalities in Iraq have occurred there.