Attacks in Baqubah, Mansur
Train, Pipeline bombed

Reuters reports on deaths in the guerrilla war on Thursday:

In Baqubah and Khan Bani Saad northeast of Baghdad, guerrillas fought battles with Iraqi soldiers, killing six of them.

In the tony Mansur district of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber struck at an Iraqi army checkpoint. He killed six civilians and wounded 8 soldiers, and two civilian cars were left in flames.

In the oil city of Kirkuk in the north, guerrillas bombed an oil pipeline that feeds petroleum to Baiji's refineries. They also damaged a gas pipeline to Baiji's power station.

In Haditha, guerrillas assassinated the assistant police chief.

The LA Times says, "In other violence, the U.S. military said two American troops had been killed and one wounded in a roadside bombing Wednesday in Baghdad . . . Elsewhere in Baghdad, a train carrying fuel exploded when it was hit by a bomb, killing two people and wounding six, police said . . . U.S. Marine jets, meanwhile, bombed insurgent positions near Haditha, killing nine insurgents, including five Syrians, the U.S. military said."

Aljazeera reported that US troops at a base north of Fallujah took mortar fire on Thursday, but there was no word of casualties. The Western wire services either disbelieved this report or ignored it, since I can't find mention of it in English.

David Enders does perhaps the only clear-eyed English-language post-mortem of the Fallujah campaign, which has left 2/3s of the buildings in the city damaged and exiled tens of thousands for over half a year. Aljazeera ran a piece on Fallujah on Wednesday, showing people living in tents on the rubble of their former homes. All this contrasts to a fluff piece in the New York Times last spring that depicted the place as largely restored and bustling, with busy traffic and healthy happy children that were all above average. Well, maybe that quarter the reporter was allowed to see looked like that.

Speaker of the Iraqi parliament Hajem al-Hassani warned the US military against invading the northern Turkmen city of Talafar [Tel Afar] the way it had Fallujah. The existence of a sitting Iraqi parliament, which is supposed to be sovereign, may be an increasing check on the freedom of the US military to operate at will in Iraq.