Eight killed when rockets hit US Military base
Pastor Dale Morgan
*Eight killed when rockets hit US Military base*
From correspondents in Baghdad
May 09, 2008 05:23am
Article from: Agence France-Presse
EIGHT people were killed and eight more wounded, including four soldiers
from US-led coalition forces, in new violence in Iraq's southern city of
Basra today, the American military said.
Two civilian contractors were among those killed when several rockets
slammed into a coalition military base in Basra at around 2.20pm (9.20pm
AEST), the military said.
In counter fire, an unmanned aerial vehicle and an aerial weapons team
killed six militants by firing Hellfire missiles.
The military said its forces destroyed the rocket rails and a vehicle
that belonged to the rocket team that fired on the base.
It did not immediately identify the nationalities of the civilian
contractors nor of the wounded soldiers.
The military said this was the first rocket attack with casualties in
Basra since March 27, two days after the Iraqi government launched a
crackdown on Shiite militiamen there.
The crackdown had triggered widespread resistance from the militants,
mostly from anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army
militia, in Basra and other Shiite regions of Iraq in which hundreds of
people have been killed.
The US military had despatched a group of marines to help Iraqi forces
quell the violence that erupted in late March in Basra.
In the past few weeks the city has been relatively calm.
"The security situation remains stable with 70 per cent of the city
secured by Iraqi security forces," the military said.