Baghdad - A roadside bomb tore through a United States assault vehicle in Iraq on Wednesday, killing 14 Marines and a civilian interpreter, in the deadliest roadside attack against US forces since the war began.
The bomb exploded near a marine amphibious assault vehicle while it was travelling south of Haditha, a town about 200km north-west of Baghdad, the US military said. One marine was wounded.
Haditha is one of several towns that has been gripped by violence in Iraq's western Anbar province. The Sunni Muslim province is the heartland of Iraq's insurgency and it has defied repeated US offensives.
The blast was the second major attack in three days against marines in the area. On Monday, six marines were killed in clashes with insurgents in Haditha, and a seventh was killed in a car bomb blast in Hit.
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At least 1 800 US soldiers have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war. Over the past month, more than 60 have died - many of them in Anbar.
In Basra, an American journalist was shot dead a few days after he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times, criticising the spread of Shi'ite Islamist fundamentalism in the southern Iraqi city.
Witnesses said that Steven Vincent and a translator had been kidnapped by gunmen after leaving a hotel on Tuesday evening. Vincent's body was found later that night.
More than 40 foreign and Iraqi journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the US-led invasion in March 2003.
A nurse at a Basra hospital said that Vincent, a freelance investigative journalist and art critic from New York City, had been shot three times in the chest.
Morgue photographs showed a red cloth around Vincent's neck and plastic handcuffs on his wrists, suggesting that he had been blindfolded and bound.
His Iraqi translator, Nouriya Ita'is, was shot twice in the chest and twice in the leg, but she was in stable condition, her sister said.
The New York Times opinion piece had also focused on the Basra police force. It quoted a police lieutenant as saying that several officers were behind hundreds of assassinations each month - mostly of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party. - Reuters
- This article was originally published on page 8 of The Mercury on August 04, 2005
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