Civilian, troop casualties in Iraq continue to increase

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An assailant dropped a grenade from a Baghdad highway overpass onto an Army vehicle Monday, killing one U.S. soldier and wounding three others.

In another part of Baghdad, relatives of people killed in an unsuccessful raid by U.S. soldiers looking for Saddam Hussein mourned their loved ones.

The death of the soldier from the 1st Armored Division brought to 50 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in hostile attacks since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1.

The tactic of dropping explosives from a highway overpass onto convoys of military vehicles is frequently used by assailants, said Army Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons, a spokesman.

"It's actually a pretty good tactic because it's hard to respond to," Fitzgibbons said. "It gives the attackers a chance to escape, especially if they drop it on the last vehicle."

Fitzgibbons said that in some cases, the U.S. military has spotted a group of people on an overpass and has been able to prevent an attack. In this case, two of the wounded suffered only minor injuries and were back on duty late in the day. The third was still being treated.

A second U.S. soldier was killed Monday in a road accident near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

Street discussions

In the wealthy Mansour neighborhood west of the Tigris River, where Sunday's unsuccessful raid in pursuit of Saddam occurred, neighbors gathered in knots on street corners to discuss it. Iraqis said at least four civilians were killed and five injured, three of them seriously.

In one car, there was a Catholic family on its way to church. Another carried several members of a Kurdish family dropping off a letter to be hand carried by a friend to a relative in Europe. The identities of the occupants of a third car were not known.

Mazan Albert, 35, his brother Alya Thamir Albert, 40, and their mother, Clementine, were on their way to church when the shooting occurred. Mazan was killed; his mother and brother were wounded and taken to a military hospital.

Clementine's sister, who came to the family's house on Monday and declined to give her name, said that although the extended family lived in different neighborhoods, they usually went to Sunday services together. It was only after church services that she realized something had happened.

She thought it unlikely that Mazan Albert, who was driving, would have run a checkpoint -- the explanation of the U.S. military for the shooting.

"I don't imagine he would refuse to stop," she said. "He was a quiet, simple man."

As a child, he had been hit by a car, and had lost the lower part of his right leg. His car was specially outfitted for someone missing a limb.

Thamir Albert, his older brother, was a translator for the Americans and mostly worked in Taji, an area north of Baghdad.

Clementine's sister said no one in the family had been told where her injured sister and nephew had been taken.

Rabin Hazim, a neighbor who came to comfort the family, said the Americans had failed to block the road until after the shooting occurred.

Body unclaimed

No one had claimed Mazan Albert's body by Monday afternoon. With multiple gunshot wounds, one to the head and two in the shoulder, he lay in a bloodied white shirt and worn blue pants on the floor of Yarmouk Hospital's makeshift morgue. The pant leg hung limp on the lower half of the right leg where he was missing part of the limb.

Next to him lay two other victims of the shooting, who also had suffered multiple gunshot wounds.

A fourth victim, a boy of about 15, had been brought in with a gunshot wound to the head. He was referred to a neurosurgery center, but Dr. Jamil Ibrahim, a general surgeon at Yarmouk hospital, said the boy could not have survived.

A Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Iraqis were in two cars that failed to stop at U.S. military checkpoints. Troops fired on both cars, he said.

"Of course that's a very dangerous thing to do, when you fail to stop at a checkpoint," the official said. "And to that extent, they represented a threat to our troops, who acted in accordance with their inherent right to self-defense."

No one was killed in the car carrying members of Mohammed Abdulrahman's family, who are Kurdish Shiite Muslims.