US forces launch strikes to root out guerillas

US forces struck at targets near Baghdad airport yesterday evening and attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets carried out raids elsewhere in Iraq in operations to root out guerillas and destroy their hideouts.

Despite the growing US toll - two more soldiers were killed in a bomb attack on Thursday - President George W. Bush vowed troops would stay until they had defeated insurgents fighting on seven months after Saddam Hussein's fall.

But Iraqis could expect a faster transfer of power, US officials said.

A spokesman for the 1st Armoured Division said US forces hit five targets around Baghdad with mortar fire yesterday evening in the third successive night of "Operation Iron Hammer", an American drive to attack guerilla positions.

"These are locations the enemy has used to fire on us. Today we are firing first," he said.

Reuters witnesses reported several explosions around the airport, in the southwest of the city, as US planes and helicopters flew overhead. Later in the evening, a succession of blasts echoed from northwest Baghdad.

The tougher US tactics follow guerilla mortar and rocket attacks on the headquarters of the US-led administration in Baghdad and a bloody few weeks in Iraq in which 16 Italian soldiers and dozens of American troops have been killed.

US officials have denied Washington was in trouble, but opinion polls show declining support among US voters for the occupation as Bush seeks re-election a year from now.

Key ally Japan has also shown cold feet about sending troops in the wake of Wednesday's suicide bomb attack on an Italian military base that killed at least 27 people.

"Look, we will stay until the job is done, and the job is for Iraq to be free and peaceful," Bush said in response to concerns the US shift in strategy to speed up the transfer of authority to the Iraqi people could lead to a premature withdrawal of US forces and leave the country in chaos.

US officials said the initial plan had been for a transfer of sovereignty after a new Iraqi constitution was ratified and elections held but the administration was considering ways to transfer some responsibility sooner.

They have not spelled out how this will be done, saying Iraq administrator Paul Bremer, now back in Baghdad after urgent consultations this week in Washington, will discuss details with the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.

The council is scheduled to meet today. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the decision to speed up a handover of power to Iraqis a positive step.

But Annan, speaking in Bolivia, did not say when or if the United Nations, which withdrew its foreign staff from Baghdad following suicide bomb attacks, would participate in the political process in Iraq.

In the latest deadly attack on occupation troops, a bomb detonated as a US convoy passed on Thursday, killing two American soldiers and wounding three, the US Army said.

Guerillas have killed at least 158 US soldiers since Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.

Near Saddam's hometown Tikrit, a US Apache helicopter spotted and killed seven Iraqi insurgents late on Thursday as they prepared to fire rockets at a US military camp, a US army spokeswoman said.

And near the Syrian border, the 82nd Airborne said F-16 fighter jets on Thursday night destroyed an isolated three-storey building used by "terrorists" as a staging area for attacks and storage of ammunition.

In the southern town of Nassiriya, divers scoured the Euphrates river for evidence after the blast that devastated the Italian base nearby. In Rome, wounded survivors returned home.

Fearing a similar attack, the US-led administration has shut its headquarters in the southern city of Basra for 36 hours for a security review, spokesman Dominic D'Angelo said.

Underscoring Iraq's fragile security, gunmen shot and wounded a Portuguese reporter and kidnapped a second in southern Iraq yesterday after attacking a convoy of vehicles, the British military and Portuguese media said.

The kidnapped reporter, Carlos Raleiras of private radio station TSF, made a plea for help on his mobile phone.

With voices speaking in Arabic behind him, Raleiras said: "Would anyone who speaks Arabic please contact me? I have to stop talking now, OK?"