The lethal ambush of a convoy carrying female U.S. troops in Fallujah underscored the difficulties of keeping women away from the front lines in a war where such boundaries are far from clear-cut.
A suicide car bomber slammed into a 7-ton U.S. military vehicle in Fallujah, killing five Marines and a Navy sailor, Marine Corps sources told NBC News, adding that at least four of the dead were women.
The U.S. military officially confirmed the deaths of four Marines. A Marine and the sailor were missing and presumed dead. Eleven of the 13 wounded troops were female.
The ambush late Thursday also suggested Iraqi insurgents may have regained a foothold in Fallujah, which has been occupied by U.S. and Iraqi forces since they regained control of the city from insurgents seven months ago.
The women were part of a team of Marines assigned to various checkpoints around Fallujah. The Marines use females at the checkpoints to search Muslim women “in order to be respectful of Iraqi cultural sensitivities,” a military statement said.
The group al-Qaida in Iraq claimed it carried out the ambush, one of the single deadliest attacks against the Marines — and against women — in this country.
Lance Cpl. Holly A. Charette, 21, from Cranston, R.I., died in Thursday’s attack, the Defense Department said Friday. A male Marine was also killed, the military said. His family identified him as Cpl. Chad Powell, 22, from northern Louisiana.
The high number of female casualties spoke to the lack of real front lines in Iraq, where U.S. troops are battling a raging insurgency and American women soldiers have participated in more close-quarters combat than in any previous conflict.
“It’s hard to stop suicide bombers, and it’s hard to stop these people that in many cases are being smuggled into Iraq from outside Iraq,” President Bush said Friday at a joint White House news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Current Pentagon policy prohibits women from serving in front line combat roles, but an increasing number of female troops have been exposed to hostile fire.
Thirty-six female troops have died since the war began, including the one that was announced Friday, said Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman. Most have died from hostile fire.
More than 11,000 women are serving in Iraq, part of 138,000 U.S. troops in the country, said Staff Sgt. Don Dees, a U.S. military spokesman.
Deadliest attack on servicewomen since 1945
Thursday’s attack may have been the single largest involving female U.S. service members since a Japanese suicide pilot slammed his plane into the USS Comfort near the Philippines in 1945, killing six Army nurses, according to figures from the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation.
Fallujah, the city about 40 miles west of Baghdad where Thursday’s attack took place, is a former insurgent stronghold invaded by U.S. forces at great cost in November. It also is the city where an Iraqi mob hung the mutilated bodies of two U.S. contractors from a bridge. On Nov. 2, 2003, two female Army soldiers were in a Chinook helicopter shot down over Fallujah.
The military did not provide the genders of the missing three Marines and a sailor believed to be in the vehicle that was attacked. They were presumed dead, said a U.S. military official in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity because the victims have not been identified.
The attack, which raised the death toll among U.S. military members since the beginning of the war to 1,732, came as Americans have grown increasingly concerned about a conflict that has shown no signs of abating.
In his radio address Saturday, Bush urged Americans to share in Iraqis’ confidence.
“The Iraqi people are growing in optimism and hope,” Bush said. “They understand that the violence is only a part of the reality in Iraq.”
Relentless carnage
The relentless carnage from the Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency has killed more than 1,263 people since April 28, when al-Jaafari announced his Shiite-dominated government.
In one such sectarian killing, gunmen Friday targeted an aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric. Police said two bodyguards also were killed trying to protect another Shiite cleric in Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite al-Amin district.
On Saturday, two suicide car bombers blew themselves up Saturday in separate attacks north of Baghdad, killing at least 14 and wounding about 18 others wounded, police and hospital officials said.
The first suicide bomber, accompanied by another five cars loaded with heavily-armed insurgents, slammed into a wall outside the home of police Lt. Muthana al-Shaker -- a member of a special forces unit -- in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, said Lt. Qassim Mohammed of the Samarra police.
Nine civilians were killed and 16 were wounded in the attack on the street outside al-Shaker's home. He was not injured, Mohammed said. At least six were killed in the initial explosion and the rest died later, hospital officials said.
Police targeted
Two insurgents were killed when a roadside bomb they were planting outside al-Shaker's house after the attack blew up, he said. That bomb was intended to kill police and emergency services members when they arrived at the scene, Mohammed added.
The attack occurred at 4:00 p.m. (1200 GMT) when six cars arrived on the street in front of al-Shaker's house. The five cars, whose occupants were armed with automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades, blocked the road and opened the way for the suicide attacker to barrel into the home.
In the second attack, a suicide attacker rammed his vehicle into an Iraqi police patrol on a bridge in southwest Mosul, killing at least five and wounding two, said U.S. Army Capt. Mark Walter, a spokesman in the town, which is 225 miles northwest of Baghdad. The second attack happened at 8:30 p.m. (1630 GMT).
Elsewhere, gunmen ambushed a police patrol in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, killing eight policemen Friday, police and hospital officials said Saturday.
Gunmen killed two policemen from a commando unit patrolling western Baghdad on Saturday, police 1st Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said. In addition, Iraqi police found the corpse of a uniformed policeman in another section of Baghdad, his hands bound behind his back and plastic wire around his neck, police Capt. Mohammed Izz al-Din said.
In a separate incident Saturday, gunmen killed three policemen on a road about 46 miles south of Amarah, police 1st Lt. Hussein Karim Hassan said.