Bomb kills 14 US marines in Iraq

Insurgents blew up a US assault vehicle in western Iraq yesterday, killing 14 Marines and a civilian interpreter in the deadliest roadside bomb attack against American forces since the war began.

In the southern city of Basra, an American journalist was found shot dead four days after he wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times criticising Shi'ite Islamic fundamentalism.

The roadside bomb exploded under a Marine amphibious assault vehicle as it was travelling south of Haditha, a town on the Euphrates river about 200 km northwest of Baghdad, the US military said in a statement. One Marine was wounded.

Haditha is one of several violent towns in Iraq's western Anbar province, the Sunni Muslim heartland of an insurgency that has defied repeated US offensives.

The blast, which highlighted the effectiveness of makeshift bombs against the most powerful military in the world, was the second major attack against Marines in the Haditha area in the past three days. On Monday, six Marines were killed in the town, and a seventh was killed by a car bomb in nearby Hit.

Both Haditha attacks involved the same unit, Regimental Combat Team 2 of the 2nd Marine Division, statements showed.

"This is a very lethal and unfortunately adaptive enemy that we are faced with inside Iraq," US Army Brigadier General Carter told a news briefing at the Pentagon.

Iraqi leaders have drawn more Sunni Arabs away from fighting and into the political process in a bid to pacify the country.

But guerillas have kept up the pressure with suicide and roadside bombings that have killed thousands.

"We know the terrorist/insurgent forces are trying to stop the Iraqi democratic process in any way they can and one way they think will work will be to make spectacular attacks," said US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan.

"This does not mean that there is a spike in attacks or that they are becoming more effective against our forces."

Last December, 21 people including 14 US servicemen were killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside a mess hall at a military base in the northern city of Mosul. That was the deadliest attack on a US installation since the war began.

At least 1,800 US troops have died in Iraq since March 2003. In the past two weeks 45 have died, many of them in Anbar. US forces have launched two major offensives around Haditha since May to try to crush insurgents.

Roadside bombs, concealed in everything from soda cans to dead animals, are the single biggest killers of US forces in Iraq, penetrating even the heavy armour of tanks.

Many improvised explosive devices, as the troops call them, are spotted and defused. But dozens go off every day.

US generals have voiced concern in recent months that insurgents have been making deadlier bombs, including, they say, "shaped charges" - explosives which direct the force of their blast in a concentrated direction to penetrate armour.

On several occasions this year, entire crews of armoured vehicles have been killed by makeshift bombs on the road.

In an Internet statement yesterday, an Iraqi militant group said it captured a US Marine after killing eight others in a clash in western Iraq. But the Pentagon denied the report.

In Basra, witnesses said gunmen kidnapped American journalist and author Steven Vincent and his translator shortly after they left a hotel on Tuesday evening. His body was found hours later, a US diplomat said.