BAGHDAD, March 16: The US military said on Thursday it launched its biggest air offensive in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to root out guerillas near a town where recent violence raised fears of civil war.
Announced with media fanfare just hours after Iraq’s parliament held a brief first meeting that did nothing to end a political stalemate over forming a government, the US military said 50 aircraft took part in the raids north of Baghdad.
The US military released to the media photographs of troop-carrying Black Hawk helicopters lined up in a row for the offensive. There were no pictures of warplanes.
A defence official at the Pentagon said it was relatively large, but sought to downplay the scale of the operation. “It’s not precision bombs and things like that,” the official said.
Another official said it was ‘predominantly’ a helicopter operation that involved UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and other aircraft and the insertion of ground forces.
A military statement said ‘Operation Swarmer’ involved more than 1,500 Iraqi and US troops and 200 armoured vehicles targeting guerillas active near Samarra.
A defence official in Washington said 600-700 of the troops involved were Iraqi government soldiers. The rest were Americans.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said the offensive showed Iraqi forces, some facing accusations of cooperating with the guerillas, are increasingly capable of securing the country.
PREVIOUS ASSAULTS: The US military has launched several major offensives against guerillas since the 2003 invasion, including one involving several thousand soldiers that captured the stronghold of Falluja.
There were also a series of assaults in the Sunni heartland in western Iraq’s Anbar province which failed to hurt the resistance and infuriated Iraqis who dug their loved ones out of the rubble after US air strikes.
Security crackdowns were also carried out near Samarra, the site of a bombing attack last month on a shrine that set off sectarian reprisals and pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war.
The military statement said the offensive was launched on Thursday morning and is ‘expected to continue for several days as a thorough search of the objective area is conducted’.
“Initial reports from the objective area indicate that a number of enemy weapons caches have been captured, containing artillery shells, explosives, IED-(bomb) making materials, and military uniforms,” said the statement.
The US military has issued frequent statements about the capture of arms, but Iraq is still awash with weapons.
As it has done in the past, the military made a point of saying both American and Iraqi forces were taking part in the operation in an apparent bid to show that rebuilding of Iraqi forces was making progress.
The United States has 130,000 troops in Iraq. Washington has said it will begin withdrawing troops as US-trained Iraqi forces take over security.
But military officials have said few units were capable of fighting militants on their own, let alone protecting people from suicide bombings, shootings, and kidnappings.
SECTARIAN ATTACKS: The number of sectarian killings in Baghdad has risen to an average of 30 a day from 10 a day since last month’s shrine bombing, a US military spokesman said on Thursday.
The dumping of bodies, many of them bound and showing signs of torture, has long been a feature of the violence.
The bodies of 80 people apparently killed in sectarian attacks were found in Baghdad in the 48-hour period that ended on Monday. Those killings followed the death of 50 people in car bomb attacks in a Shia militia stronghold.
Maj Gen Rick Lynch told reporters Al Qaeda and foreign fighters were behind many of the sectarian killings as part of a campaign to incite sectarian violence.—Reuters
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