Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News Staff

BAGHDAD, 23 January 2004 — Iraqi guerrillas killed nine people, including two US soldiers, in stepped up attacks in the so-called Sunni triangle yesterday even as the American commander responsible for security in the region claimed that the backbone of the insurgency has been broken.

The guerrillas attacked an Iraqi police post in Fallujah with assault rifles and a grenade, killing two policemen and a civilian, hours after a mortar attack on a US base killed two soldiers and wounded one.

Late Wednesday, the rebels opened fire on a bus carrying Iraqi women home from work at a military base west of Baghdad, killing four women and wounding six, including the driver.

South of the capital near Diwaniya, a Spanish Civil Guard police commander was shot in the head and seriously wounded during a joint operation with Iraqi police against “members of a terrorist group”, the Spanish Defense Ministry said.

Police near Fallujah, a hotbed of resistance 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, said guerrillas in a passing car threw a grenade and opened fire with AK-47 assault rifles at a checkpoint on the highway toward the restive town of Ramadi.

“There was little we could do. There was a bunch of men with checkered headdresses who fired from the back of a pickup truck,” said policeman Hashim Tawfik as he lay in a hospital bed, still wearing his blood-stained shirt. “All I could do was jump behind a dirt mound on the side of the highway and wait.”

Maj. Josslyn Aberle, spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, said insurgents fired mortars and rockets at a US military encampment outside the town of Baqouba, killing two soldiers and critically injuring another. The three were standing outside the operations center when the projectiles landed, she said. Their deaths brought to 505 the number of US service members who have died since the US-led coalition launched the Iraq war March 20.

The attack on the women took place in Fallujah, when the nine women were being driven to work, said Khajiq Serkis, the driver who was shot in the leg.

He said from his hospital bed that he was part of a three-car convoy being chased by the four attackers in a Opel sedan, their faces covered by scarves. Serkis said his minibus lagged behind and the gunmen shot the tires before firing indiscriminately at the occupants. Four women were killed and the other five were injured.

Most of the women were dozing when the shooting started, said a survivor, Vera Ibrahim, 39. She said the driver continued to speed until he too was hit.

All the victims, who were Armenian or Assyrian Christians, worked at a nearby US military base in Habbaniyah. The women worked in the laundry and Serkis was employed as a mechanic and driver.

Also yesterday, the 23-year-old son of a former senior official from Saddam Hussein’s Baath party was slain in the southern city of Basra by an unidentified gunman, police said.

Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division, told reporters at the Defense Department in a satellite video news conference from his headquarters in Tikrit that “the former regime elements we’ve been combating have been brought to their knees.”

In December Odierno’s forces led the raid that captured former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein near Tikrit, his tribal home.

But the US plan has been attacked by Iraq’s most respected Shiite leader because it does not allow for direct elections until 2005.

—Additional input from agencies