April deadliest month this year for U.S. in Iraq

updated 2:35 p.m. ET April 28, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - An American soldier was killed in a roadside bombing north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Friday, as April became the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Iraq this year.

Elsewhere, American troops killed a local al-Qaida in Iraq leader and two other insurgents in a raid north of Baghdad, The death toll in two days of fighting around Baqouba climbed to 58, including seven Iraqi soldiers, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Awad said.

The U.S. soldier died about 7:15 p.m. Thursday when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, the military said. That brought the American death toll for the month to at least 67, according to an Associated Press count.

April’s death toll is the highest monthly figure so far this year. Last month, 31 U.S. troops were killed in Iraq, the lowest monthly toll since February 2004. At least 2,397 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to the AP count.

Just outside Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, U.S. forces raided a house where Hamid al-Takhi, the local al-Qaida in Iraq leader, and the two other insurgents were hiding, the military said in a statement.

Al-Takhi, known as the “emir” of Samarra, was gunned down while fleeing the house, and the other two militants were killed while trying to defend it with grenades, the U.S. military said. After they were killed, the U.S. troops found a car parked nearby containing a grenade launcher, rockets, AK-47s, grenades and a shotgun, the U.S. military said.

Iraqi police said al-Takhi had been responsible for many insurgent attacks against coalition forces and civilians in the area.

The police initially said Iraqi commandos had carried out the raid but the U.S. later said American troops had conducted the operation using Iraqi intelligence.

Curfew set in Baqouba after fights
In Baqouba, Iraqi police were fighting insurgents in the streets Friday, and witnesses saw at least two wounded police officers being carried to police vehicles for evacuation. Iraqi soldiers also patrolled the city, which was closed to pedestrians and traffic by a curfew.

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Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq — the country’s most feared insurgent group — appeared in a video earlier this week trying to rally Sunni Arabs to fight Iraq’s new government and denouncing Sunnis who cooperate with it as “agents” of the Americans.

Also Friday, two mortars or rockets were fired at downtown Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, where Iraq’s government meets and the U.S. Embassy is located. One landed inside the zone but failed to detonate, while the other exploded nearby on the other side of the Tigris River, the U.S. military said. No casualties were immediately reported.

On Friday, the weekly day of worship in mostly Muslim Iraq, a roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi police patrol exploded in southwestern Baghdad at 8:20 a.m., killing one policeman and wounding two, said police Capt. Jamil Hussein.

Around the same time, police found the corpses of two middle-aged Iraqi men in a mostly Sunni Arab neighborhood of western Baghdad, Hussein said. The men, handcuffed, blindfolded and bullet-ridden, appeared to be the latest victims of a wave of kidnappings and killings by Sunni and Shiite death squads that target civilians.

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