Surging to failure and frustration

Surge strategy’ in Iraq causes surge in US deaths

Eight US soldiers killed in Iraq, car bomb kills 21 at Baghdad mosque, four Germans abducted in capital.

BAGHDAD - Six US soldiers were killed when explosions hit their patrol northeast of Baghdad on the same day that two more died when their helicopter crashed, the US military announced on Tuesday.

"Six Task Force Lightning Soldiers were killed when explosions occurred near their vehicles while conducting operations in Diyala Province, Monday," said the military's statement, which added that three more were wounded.

On Monday a military helicopter was also attacked and crashed in the same province, a rural region north of baghdad where an increasingly vicious insurgency is claiming large numbers of US soldiers.

At least 111 US servicemen have died in May, making it the bloodiest of the year for the military. The latest casualties bring the American toll since the war began in 2003 to 3,455, according to Pentagon figures.

Foreigners kidnapped

Four Germans working for the Iraqi finance ministry were reported kidnapped in Baghdad on Tuesday by men wearing national police uniforms, a security official said.

The men are computer science experts training civil servants at the ministry's information department on Palestine Street in the city centre when 40 police vehicles surrounded the building, he said.

"The ministry is checking the reports of the suspected kidnappings of German citizens in Iraq," a German foreign ministry spokesman in Berlin said.

The four men were taken out at gunpoint and driven off by men wearing the new uniforms of the national police, a heavily-armed paramilitary unit under the interior ministry.

The German ambassador to Baghdad said he had no comment and referred all queries to Berlin. A Western security source, however, described the victims as one expert and three bodyguards.

In 2006, Baghdad went through a rash of kidnappings by large numbers of men wearing military-style uniforms, particularly those of the national police. The units were then issued new uniforms to distinguish them from criminals.

It would not be the first time Germans have been captured by gangs operating in Iraq, which is in the grip of a vicious insurgency and sectarian war.

A 61-year-old German woman married to an Iraqi, and her 20-year-old son were seized on February 6 in Baghdad where they had lived for several years.

The pair were last seen in a video released in April by their insurgent captors, begging for their lives. The kidnappers threatened to kill them if German troops were not withdrawn from Afghanistan.

Germany has no forces in Iraq, but nearly 3,000 troops in Afghanistan serving with the NATO-led force.

Two German engineers were kidnapped in January 2006 and released three months later. Before that, German archaelogist Susanne Osthoff was held for three weeks in 2005 and released unharmed.

Car bomb attack in Baghdad

A car bomb exploded outside a Shiite prayer hall in southwestern Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 21 people and wounding 53 according to medical officials, shortly after another attack killed 12.

Survivors of the explosion told Yarmuk hospital officials that the car exploded outside the al-Imma Husseiniya, a Shiite prayer hall in the mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood of Amil.

The blast came less than an hour after a suicide car bomb exploded in a busy Baghdad square near a police patrol on Tuesday, killing at least 12 people.

The first bomber was targeting a passing police patrol and killed at least one officer and wounded two others in the crowded Tayaran Square. Al-Kindi hospital reported receiving 12 dead, including a woman, and 33 wounded.

Baghdad is in the grip of a bombing campaign by insurgents bent on fomenting sectarian violence between the Iraq capital's rival Sunni and Shiite factions and on undermining a 14-week-old US and Iraqi security plan.

Original article posted here.