U.S. and Iraqi troops moved against al-Qaeda on two separate fronts Thursday, with house-to- house searches in Mosul and an operation in the desert to stanch the flow of insurgents and weapons to that northern city.
With the new sweep, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is aiming to put down Sunni extremists.
Mosul, a key transport crossroads between Baghdad, Syria and other points, is considered the last major urban base of al-Qaeda in Iraq after the group lost strongholds in western Anbar province.
U.S. Marines were operating farther south, near Lake Tharthar, a remote desert region that has been a refuge for al-Qaeda fighters and a back channel for supplying the network in the north.
In Baghdad, four Iranian Embassy employees were shot and wounded, two of them seriously, at an Iraqi checkpoint on Thursday night, Iranian and Iraqi officials said.
A spokesman for the embassy suggested that the Iranians, all of them administrative employees, might have been targeted for political purposes.
Police said Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint fired on two SUVs carrying the Iranians after coming under fire themselves.
The Iranians said they were on their way to dinner, according to the police report, although the embassy spokesman said the men were heading to a Shiite shrine.
