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 BAGHDAD, Iraq - American troops who came under
attack killed 11 assailants in a town north of Baghdad, the military said
Tuesday, a day after U.S. commanders said Saddam Hussein was providing useful
insights into Iraq's escalating insurgency.
In Saddam's hometown of
Tikrit, a roadside bomb injured three soldiers on
Tuesday.
Gunmen ambushed a U.S. patrol Monday afternoon in the
town of Samarra, 60 miles north of
Baghdad, a military statement said. The
attackers used automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades but caused
neither casualties nor damage to the patrol which called in reinforcements,
the statement said.
A company commander on
the scene said 11 insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight.
Samarra, a volatile town in the
so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad, was the scene of clashes
between U.S. troops and insurgents last
month. U.S. commanders initially claimed to
have killed 54 guerrillas, but local residents and police reported that less
than 10 people - most of them civilians - died in the firefight.
In
Tikrit, U.S. officers said three soldiers
were wounded on Tuesday by a roadside bomb. Two were said to have sustained
serious injuries.
Meanwhile, a military
statement said that soldiers in the town of Ramadi west of Baghdad killed three protesters and
wounded two more on Monday, after up to 750 people rallied in a show of
support for Saddam.
The statement said that
U.S. troops were fired upon
repeatedly and that one soldier was wounded.
Pro-Saddam
demonstrations have been held in several Iraqi towns, casting doubts on
claims by the U.S.-led coalition that the people of Iraq universally welcomed his
arrest.
A military said Tuesday
that a U.S. soldier died when he fell out
of the vehicle he was riding north of Baghdad. It did not provide further
details on the incident.
American officials said
interrogations of Saddam, whose current location was unknown, will focus
first on getting intelligence on the insurgency.
The U.S. military said it expected the
ousted leader will clarify accusations that his armed forces had large
arsenals of banned chemical, biological weapons and ballistic missiles, as well
as an active program aimed at producing nuclear weapons. Those allegations
were the main rationale for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but no weapons have been found
almost nine months later.
Since Saddam's capture,
U.S. Army teams from the 1st Armored Division have captured one high-ranking
former regime figure - who has yet to be named - and that prisoner has given
up a few others, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling
said Monday.
The intelligence that
led the military to the men came from the first transcript of Saddam's
initial interrogation, and a briefcase of documents Saddam carried with him
at the time of his arrest, Hertling said.
"We've already
gleaned intelligence value from his capture," he said.
U.S. commanders have
predicted that the guerrillas may be spurred to fight even harder in the
short term, perhaps only to prove that Saddam meant little to them.
"Even if the head
of the snake is cut off, the rest of the snake continues to move for a while,"
Hertling said. "There may be an increasing
desire to execute attacks."
In Tikrit,
about 700 people rallied in the center of town Monday chanting "Saddam
is in our hearts, Saddam is in our blood." U.S. soldiers and Iraqi policemen
yelled back: "Saddam is in our jail."
In Fallujah,
another hotspot of anti-American resistance west of Baghdad, crowds roamed the streets
shouting pro-Saddam slogans such as "We defend Saddam with our
souls," after the Iraqi police withdrew from the streets, the crowd
overran the mayor's office, a military statement said.
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