Iraqi troops force way into besieged town

Earlier three US soldiers were killed by mortar fire at a US base in the city of Ramadi overnight, the US military said yesterday.

Seven servicemen were also wounded in the attack, three of them seriously, the military said in a statement. The attackers were believed to have fled into a nearby mosque. But when Iraqi security forces searched it, they found no insurgents.

Conflicting accounts existed among government officials over whether hostages had been freed from Al-Madain, where the crisis had sparked fears of wider sectarian strife between Iraq's Shia majority and embittered Sunnis.

Meanwhile, 19 corpses were also found south of Baghdad in the latest discovery of executed bodies in the troubled region around Madain populated by a mixture of Shias, Saddam Hussein loyalists and hardcore Islamists.

Members of parliament meeting yesterday expressed outrage over the Madain hostage drama and called for a military strike against the belt of towns south of the capital.

"By the end of this week, we will be conducting a military offensive starting from Jurf Al-Nadaf through al-Wida and al-Madain," National Security Advisor Qassem al-Daoud told parliament, naming a string of towns on the capital's outskirts.

After a day of tense standoff, Iraqi forces, backed by US troops, went into battle Sunday morning.

"Police forces, backed by coalition forces, entered the town at 9:00 am (05H00 GMT) and encountered severe resistance from the terrorists", a defence ministry official told AFP.

Government forces recaptured half of the town and freed 10 to 15 families held hostage by the gunmen, he said Sunday morning, adding that the clashes were continuing.

However this was contradicted by Daoud, who denied in parliament that the ongoing rescue operation, involving one US and four Iraqi battalions, had found any hostages.

Officials have suggested the number of hostages in town could be as high as 80.

The take-over by gunmen on Saturday of Madain, a town built on the ruins of the ancient city of Ctesiphonon, was the most blatant attempt to date to purge a community of a rival ethnic or religious faction in the two years since Saddam's regime fell.

Raising tension further, the gunmen blew up an empty Shia mosque in the town on Saturday.

"These are terrorist activities aiming at stirring civil war," Daoud told parliament.

He described Sunni insurgents as turning the string of pastoral communities below the capital into a "terrorism centre".

Meanwhile, hospital said 19 unidentified bodies have been found over the past few days in the Aziziyah region, south of Baghdad, some of them in the Tigris river.