More Than 30 Dead in Baqubah Assault

BAGHDAD —  Clashes broke out Thursday in the ethnically and religiously mixed Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, with more than 30 people reported killed in intense fighting.

Witnesses said that at least 100 insurgents attacked police stations and checkpoints in enclaves near the provincial capital of Baqubah, leaving at least a dozen dead. Gen. Adnan Bawi, provincial police commander, said the attackers came in six waves in an attempt to take over the city.

U.S. helicopter gunships launched airstrikes on suspected insurgent positions in the dense thicket of orchards surrounding the area, police said.

American military officials said 21 insurgents were killed and 43 captured in the fighting. At least seven members of the Iraqi security forces and two civilians were injured, a news release said.

Authorities established a curfew until 4 p.m. today.

“Movement in the city is paralyzed now,” Bawi said.

A roadside bomb targeting a patrol of Italian and Romanian troops in Nasiriya in the country’s Shiite-dominated south killed three Italian soldiers and one from Romania. Witnesses said Italian troops sealed off streets as they removed casualties. Italy’s newly elected prime minister, Romano Prodi, has vowed to pull his country’s 2,600 troops out of Iraq soon.

North of Baghdad, two high-ranking Iraqi police officers assigned to pay salaries of those guarding the country’s electricity infrastructure were reported kidnapped in Ad Dawr, a Sunni Arab village near Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.

Police said 16 bodies were also recovered in Baghdad and other cities, victims of execution-style killings with apparent sectarian overtones.

Still, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said that insurgent attacks in Baghdad had decreased by 10% last week and that the number of victims of ethnic and sectarian violence in the capital was the lowest last week since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.

“We don’t see us moving toward a civil war in Iraq,” he said. “In fact, we’re seeing a movement away.”

Special correspondents in Baqubah, Basra, Samarra and Taji contributed to this report.