RAMADI, Iraq : Six British and American troops were killed in Iraq over the last 24 hours as the US military battered the flashpoint city of Fallujah with air strikes ahead of an expected all-out assault.

A suicide car bomb and mortar fire at a checkpoint killed three newly redeployed British soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter on Thursday.



The attack happened as troops from the Black Watch regiment crossed for the first time to the east bank of the River Euphrates, southwest of Baghdad.

Eight British soldiers were also injured in the first major incident since several hundred of them were moved from southern Iraq to more dangerous areas near Baghdad to relieve US troops preparing for an offensive in Fallujah.

"We always knew that there were risks involved in these engagements, but this is for the Iraqi people," Britain's Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram said, when breaking the news of the combat deaths.

"Is it a price worth paying? Well, the Iraqis are the best judge of that."

Two US marines also died "in action" and four were injured in Al-Anbar province west of the Iraqi capital, where the rebel hotspots of Fallujah and Ramadi are located, the US military said.

Another US soldier was killed and one wounded when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb on Thursday night north of Baghdad.

Seventy-three British troops have died in Iraq since US-led forces invaded the country in March 2003, 34 of them in combat, while the latest US deaths brought to 1,121 the number of US military personnel killed since the invasion.

Violence is expected to increase in the battered country following US President George W. Bush's election win earlier this week.

Flushed with victory, Bush declared Thursday Iraq was on the "path to stability" but said he had not decided whether to boost troop levels there ahead of national elections promised in January.

US-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has pledged to crush pockets of resistance before the polls, and in recent weeks US troops have massed around the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and nearby Ramadi amid mounting expectations of a double-pronged assault.

In a continuing barrage on the rebel bastion, US war planes launched five air strikes against suspected insurgent positions in Fallujah in the last 24 hours.

"Iraqi security forces and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force continue to degrade and disrupt anti-Iraqi (insurgent) forces in the Fallujah-Ramadi area," a military statement said.

Starting at 4:40 pm (1340 GMT) Thursday and ending at 1:10 am Friday, planes supporting US marines on the ground destroyed suspected rebel fortifications and a weapons cache in the southeast and northern Fallujah, it said.

Since Monday, Multi-National Forces-West have also captured and destroyed large numbers of mortars, rockets and other explosives.

In Ramadi, the capital city of Al-Anbar province, a marine operation discovered and disarmed a youth centre that had been rigged with explosives and found more that two tons of explosives hidden in a mosque.

"The discoveries were made during a sweep of the city looking for improvised explosive devices," the military said in a separate statement.

Fifty suspected insurgents were also netted in the sweep, it added.

Thousands of residents have fled Fallujah since the US military began a campaign of air strikes during the summer in the hunt for Islamic militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his followers who are believed to use the city as an operating base.

Zarqawi, a Jordanian national who is Iraq's most wanted man, is blamed for some of the worst bombings and kidnappings in the country since last year's US-led invasion.

A funeral was held in southern Japan on Friday for one of Zarqawi's victims, 24-year-old backpacker Shosei Koda, who was beheaded after being kidnapped by militants in Baghdad last month.
Channelnewsasia.com