US Backed Iraqis Raid Camp

Iraqi and American forces killed at least 80 insurgents on Tuesday in a fierce battle during a morning raid on what appeared to be the largest guerrilla training camp to be discovered in the war, Iraqi officials said Wednesday. Seven Iraqi policemen were killed and six wounded.

Scores of guerrillas were reported to be living in tents and makeshift buildings at the marshy lakeside encampment, northwest of Baghdad.
The size and location of the camp suggested a shift in strategy by insurgents, American military officials said: It was first time the military had come across insurgents organized in such numbers in a remote rural location, an arrangement similar to Al Qaeda training camps in the arid mountains of Afghanistan.
"A year ago, they preferred to organize in small cells in urban areas," said Maj. Richard Goldenberg, a spokesman for the 42nd Infantry Division, which sent soldiers and attack helicopters to aid the hundreds of Iraqi commandos who raided the camp. "Here, they organized into a large group in a remote site, perhaps under the impression that coalition forces wouldn't look for them there."
The Iraqi and American forces, who were responding to a tip from villagers nearby, discovered munitions, training manuals, car bombs, suicide-bomber vests and computers, along with identification papers that indicated that some of the fighters had come from outside Iraq, Major Goldenberg said.
He declined to specify the nationalities of the foreign insurgents; Iraqi officials said most came from Arab countries, and a statement released early Wednesday by the Interior Ministry said an Algerian had been arrested.
American and Iraqi officials said they had no immediate information on how or when the camp was built.
Before the American invasion, the lake, Tharthar, which lies in a parched and barren region, was a popular tourist spot for Iraqis and was the site of a fish-farming project started by the government of Saddam Hussein. The lake straddles Anbar and Salahuddin Provinces, both insurgent strongholds dominated by Sunni Arabs. Its southern and eastern shores lie close to cities with strong guerrilla cells.

The battle was the second one in recent days in which American forces fought a large, highly organized group of insurgents. On Sunday an American convoy fended off an ambush by 40 to 50 insurgents in Salman Pak, 12 miles southeast Baghdad. The American military said 27 attackers were killed in that fight.
Gen. Rashid Flaiyeh, the head of the Iraqi police commandos in Salahuddin Province, said in an interview with Iraqiya, the state-run television network, that the fighting had lasted seven hours and that American and Iraqi forces had killed at least 80 guerrillas.
Major Goldenberg said that the American military estimated the battle took two hours and that there were about 80 insurgents at the camp, but could not give a count of how many were killed. The major said no prisoners were taken during the assault, despite the Interior Ministry statement highlighting the arrest of the Algerian.
The Interior Ministry statement said that 85 insurgents had been killed, and that the fighters had planned to attack Samarra, 34 miles east of the lake, with a large number of car bombs.
Based on the Iraqis' counts, the number of insurgents killed Tuesday would be the highest reported in a single battle since the American invasion of Falluja in November. "It was one of the largest such engagements that I'm aware of," said Col. Robert Potter, a spokesman for the American command in Baghdad.
In his interview, General Flaiyeh said the bodies of Filipino and Arab men were found among the rebels. "I was surprised there were men from the Philippines," he said. "The Arab countries are sending fighters into Iraq because they want to destroy our democratic movement."
The battle began at about 11 a.m., as members of the First Police Commando Battalion of the Interior Ministry, acting on tips from residents of the area, approached the camp across a flat expanse, Major Goldenberg said. As the commandos closed in, guerrillas began firing with assault rifles, machine guns and mortars or rockets.
"It was quite likely they could see the approach of other forces from a distance," Major Goldenberg said.
The Iraqi police then called for support from the 42nd Infantry Division. The Americans sent in Apache attack helicopters and smaller OH-58D Kiowa helicopters, as well as ground troops. An official at the Interior Ministry said some insurgents tried to escape by boat across the lake, but were killed on the water or as they tried pushing off from shore.
The training camp was so extensive that American and Iraqi troops were still searching it on Wednesday, Major Goldenberg said. The manuals found included "techniques they would have used to train other insurgents to conduct operations," he said, declining to go into details.
The 42nd Infantry Division, charged with securing the northern Sunni Triangle, has never "come across such an organized facility for the Iraqi insurgent elements," the major said.
Between 500 and 700 Iraqi commandos took part in the assault, an Interior Ministry official said.
Officers of the 42nd Infantry Division have been training Iraqi security forces at division headquarters by the Tigris River in Tikrit. The training has been taking place on an island in the middle of the river, and experienced Iraqi officers are increasingly doing some of the teaching, American commanders say.
The use of Iraqi forces to lead an ambitious assault like the one on Tuesday "reflects the trend we expect to see for the rest of the year," Major Goldenberg said.
On Wednesday, violence also flared in Baghdad, even as Shiite and Kurdish leaders continued heated negotiations to form a coalition government, nearly two months after the elections for a constitutional assembly.
An insurgent mortar attack killed an Iraqi girl and injured another child at a primary school in western Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. The mortar crashed into a school in the Amariya neighborhood, an area rife with insurgents between downtown Baghdad and Abu Ghraib prison.
In Etafiyah, two policemen were killed and their driver injured as they tried unsuccessfully to defuse a roadside bomb near a prominent Shiite mosque, the official said.
Two insurgents tried to set off a suicide car bomb in Kadhimiya, a Shiite neighborhood in northern Baghdad where one of the holiest shrines of the Shiite world is located, but injured only themselves after they failed to detonate the explosives properly. The Interior Ministry official identified the driver of the car, a gold Opel sedan, as Ahmed al-Janabi, an Iraqi.
Since the American invasion, Shiite holy sites have come under frequent attack from Sunni Arabs trying to ignite a large-scale civil war. Ordinary Iraqis often blame foreign jihadists for the suicide car bombings at those sites, saying even the most militant Iraqis could never carry out such acts of bloodshed.