| WASHINGTON, March 7, 2007 – Coalition forces have killed five and captured five terrorists in Iraq in recent days.
Multinational Division Baghdad soldiers discovered five terrorists emplacing improvised explosive devices at a village near the banks of the Euphrates River in Baghdad on March 5. Soldiers engaged the terrorists with small-arms fire, killing four.
Following the firefight, the soldiers recovered two AK-47 assault rifles. They turned the terrorists’ bodies over to local authorities and confiscated the weapons.
Elsewhere in Iraq that day, Multinational Division Baghdad soldiers discovered a weapons cache along the main highway into Baghdad, near the Radwaniyah village. The cache contained 10 fragmentation hand grenades, 165 mortar primers, eight 12.7 mm machine gun rounds, two bags of bulk explosives with blasting caps, a box with 100 blasting caps, 1,000 9 mm pistol rounds, six hand grenade fuses, a bag of plastic explosives, 1,000 AK-47 rounds, and an improvised explosive device.
This week in Tikrit, aerial surveillance helicopters killed a terrorist and wounded two March 4 as the terrorists attempted to remove munitions from a cache site. Paratroopers from Battery B, Task Force 1-319th, were immediately dispatched to search the area and discovered more than 600 mortar rounds and anti-tank mines with fuses. An explosive ordnance detachment detonated the munitions at the site.
In Baghdad that day, soldiers of 5th Battalion, 4th Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division, with coalition partners, detained three individuals found with bomb-making materials. The three suspects were detained for questioning, military officials said.
That day in Yusufiyah, Iraqi army and Multinational Division Baghdad troops found three caches containing weapons and ammunition. The caches, hidden in camouflaged buckets, contained 22 Katyusha rockets, 13 rocket-propelled grenade rounds, a 60 mm mortar tube, two full drums of PKC medium machine gun ammunition, and 12 rolls of detonation cord.
“This is another significant find in our area of operations,” Army Maj. Web Wright, a spokesman, said. “We find lots of mortar rounds in this area, but finding the mortar tube is important, because the tube is the only way to launch the rounds.
“Without the tube, the enemy loses not just a weapon, but a capability,” he said.
(Compiled from Multinational Corps Iraq news releases.) |