BAGHDAD — Five U.S. soldiers died in a roadside bomb blast Monday as fighting raged in Mosul, a northern city identified by Iraqi and American officials as a key hub for Sunni militants.
Soon after the vehicle blew up, men sprayed gunfire from a mosque at the rest of the unit, who returned fire, the U.S. Army said in a statement.
Iraqi soldiers stormed the mosque, but the gunmen had fled, according to the statement. The firefight lasted close to an hour, police said.
As of Monday, at least 3,940 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
U.S. and Iraqi officials have called Mosul the last urban bastion of al-Qaeda in Iraq after largely quelling the group’s violence in Baghdad, western Anbar province and Diyala province.
In November 2004, Sunni insurgents briefly overran the city. Many veterans of late dictator Saddam Hussein’s army reside in Mosul and are believed to have lent their expertise to Sunni fighters opposed to the new U.S.-backed political order.
Three thousand U.S. forces are stationed in the region around Mosul, which is home to 1.7 million people and is fraught with tensions between Arabs and Kurds.
“Mosul was used for a long time as a hub between the Syrian borders and the rest of Iraq. It is also a province with a contentious ethnic fault line with the Kurdistan Regional Government,” said Iraq’s national security advisor, Dr. Mowaffaq Rubaie.
Additional Iraqi tanks and aircraft arrived in Mosul on Sunday as officials vowed to root out al-Qaeda in Iraq after a booby-trapped building exploded Wednesday. Initial reports said 34 people died in the blast, but an Iraqi Red Crescent Society report released over the weekend said 60 had been killed. A suicide bomber killed the police chief of Nineveh province Thursday.
Iraqi defense ministry spokesman Mohammed Askari said the Iraqi army and police in Mosul had made tactical blunders in the past year.
