U.S. Troops Battle Militants in Mosul

BAGHDAD —  U.S. troops backed by attack helicopters clashed with militants Tuesday in the northern city of Mosul, the military and Iraqi officials said.

Lt. Gen. Ahmad Mohammed Khalaf, commander of Mosul’s police forces, said at a news conference that U.S. aircraft had destroyed two homes where the militants were holed up, killing 20.

However, U.S. military spokesman Sgt. John H. Franzen said soldiers had reported minimal damage to two buildings and found no one injured or dead.

He said American troops came under fire as they were investigating reports that a homemade bomb had been planted in the area. They called in helicopters for support.

A reporter at the scene said that there were heavy exchanges of machine-gun fire and that American forces advanced into the eastern neighborhood of Dhubbat, a known insurgent stronghold.

Khalaf said U.S. soldiers had fought about 80 militants who came to Mosul from Qaim, a town on the Syrian border where American forces recently carried out a weeklong military operation against insurgents, especially foreign fighters using the area as a training and transit point.

Amid the violence, Iran’s foreign minister arrived in Baghdad to promise his country’s support for Iraq’s reconstruction, marking the highest-level visit by an Iranian since Saddam Hussein’s ouster.

Kamal Kharrazi pledged to secure his country’s borders to stop militants from entering Iraq and said the “situation would have been much worse” if Tehran had been supporting the insurgency.

Kharrazi, who held talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, President Jalal Talabani and Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, said his country was committed to supporting Iraq’s political and economic reconstruction and would do all it could to improve security conditions.

Zebari said militants had crossed the Iraq-Iran border, “but we are not saying that they are approved by the Iranian government.”

Elsewhere Tuesday, a roadside bomb killed a U.S. soldier and wounded another near Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad, the military said.

At least 1,621 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003.

Meanwhile, an Iraqi Defense Ministry official, Sgt. Alwan Jabir Risan, was killed Tuesday in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad’s impoverished Sadr City neighborhood, yet another attack aimed at the nation’s security organizations.

In Tunis, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, gunmen abducted and killed former Baath Party member Kanis Mohammed Janabi and his three sons, aged 17 to 25, police Capt. Muthana Khaled said.