Iraq: Insurgents blew up a US assault vehicle in western Iraq yesterday, killing 14 marines and a civilian interpreter in the deadliest roadside bomb attack against US forces since the war began.
In the southern city of Basra, a US journalist was found shot dead four days after he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times criticising Shia Islamic fundamentalism.
The roadside bomb exploded under a marine amphibious assault vehicle as it was travelling south of Haditha, a town on the Euphrates about 200km (120 miles) northwest of Baghdad, the US military said. One marine was wounded.
Haditha is one of several violent towns in Iraq's western Anbar province, the Sunni Muslim heartland of an insurgency that has defied repeated US offensives.
The blast, which highlighted the effectiveness of makeshift bombs against the most powerful military in the world, was the second major attack against marines in the Haditha area in the past three days. On Monday, six marines were killed in the town and a seventh was killed by a car bomb in nearby Hit.
"This is a very lethal and unfortunately adaptive enemy that we are faced with inside Iraq," Brig Gen Carter Ham told a news briefing at the Pentagon.
In Texas, President George Bush again rejected any early US withdrawal from Iraq.
"We're at war, we're facing an enemy that is ruthless. If we put out a [ pull-out] timetable, the enemy would adjust their tactics," he said in a speech.
Iraqi leaders have drawn more Sunni Arabs away from fighting and into the political process, but guerrillas have kept up the pressure with suicide and roadside bombings which have killed thousands. At least 1,800 US troops have died in Iraq since March 2003. In the past two weeks, 45 have died, many of them in Anbar.
US forces have launched two major offensives around Haditha since May to try to crush insurgents. Roadside bombs, concealed in everything from soda cans to dead animals, are the single biggest killers of US forces in Iraq, penetrating even the heavy armour of tanks.
One of Iraq's main insurgent groups, the "Army of Ansar al-Sunna", posted a video on the internet yesterday showing what it said was a US marine killed in an ambush near Haditha. The grainy video also showed scenes of fighting.
Earlier, the group said it had captured a marine, but it showed no evidence to back up the claim and the Pentagon said no marines were unaccounted for in the area.
In Basra, witnesses said gunmen kidnapped American journalist and author Steven Vincent and his translator shortly after they left a hotel on Tuesday evening. His body was found hours later, a US diplomat said.
More than 40 foreign and Iraqi journalists have been killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003. Most of them have been swept up in the violence. Mr Vincent's killing appeared more deliberate than others, suggesting it was the first targeted attack on a journalist since the 2003 war.
Mr Vincent (49), a freelance investigative journalist and art critic from New York city, was shot three times in the chest, a nurse said. Photographs from the morgue showed a red cloth around his neck and plastic handcuffs on his wrists.
"Steve, Hay al-Rebaat," said an Arabic tag identifying Vincent and the area of central Basra where his body was found. His Iraqi translator, Nouriya Ita'is, was hit by bullets but was in stable condition, her sister said.
Vincent's New York Times opinion piece criticised the failure of British forces to clamp down on what he described as a city that was "increasingly coming under the control of Shia religious groups". The article also focused on the Basra police force, saying they were working closely with hardcore Islamists.
"Basra was clearly his favourite place in Iraq," said Mitchell Muncy, who edited Vincent's book on Iraq, In the Red Zone. - (Reuters)