6 killed in Iraq violence

An Iraqi worker looks yesterday at fire raging from a sabotaged oil pipeline at al-Dibs oil field south of the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Insurgent attacks against scores of pipelines have cost Iraq between seven and eight billion dollars in lost revenues since the US-led invasion of March 2003, according to oil ministry estimates. PHOTO: AFP

The violence rumbled on a day after four US soldiers and 13 Iraqis were killed and three British soldiers jailed for abusing Iraqi civilians.

The Iraqi government said on Friday it had captured a senior aide to Zarqawi, Abu Qutaybah, close to the border with Syria, and has vowed to get Zarqawi himself.

"We are at the closest point to Zarqawi," Iraq's minister of state for national security, Kassim Daoud, said on Saturday.

Troops in tanks and armored cars stormed Haditha in the middle of the night, blowing up a weapons cache and exchanging small arms fire with guerrillas. But if militants were holed up there they appeared to have fled and resistance was light.

It also came as the Islamic extremist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda superman in Iraq and one of the world's most-wanted men, was banned under Australia's counter-terrorism laws.

Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for bombings, kidnappings and murders in Iraq, including the recent bombing of the Australian embassy in which two Iraqis were killed and two Australian soldiers wounded.

A group linked to Zarqawi claimed responsibility for an attack Friday that killed three of the US soldiers.

Amid the daily diet of ambushes and bombings, a US general has ruled out a timeline for a full transfer of security to Iraqi security as the political bargaining for a new government, premier and president lumbered on.

Two people were killed and two wounded in Baghdad when a bomb went off as a car passed near the Umm al-Qura mosque, headquarters of the Committee of Muslim Scholars, which groups Iraq's senior Sunni clerics, said witnesses and medics.

Three Iraqi women died when mortar rounds struck homes in the area around Dhuluiyah, said security sources.

Meanwhile, police said 11 people, including four women, a policeman and two civil servants, have been kidnapped in a string of abductions since Friday in the same area south of Baghdad, known as the "triangle of death".

Gunmen snatched the four women in four separate incidents in the towns of Latifiyah and Mahmudiyah on Friday.

Two of them had been travelling back with their families from pilgrimage to the Shiite Muslim holy city of Karbala when they were ambushed on the road.

In Germany, three British soldiers were jailed Friday for abusing Iraqi civilians and were dishonourably discharged from the army.