American aircraft blasted a residential neighborhood in Fallujah on Saturday, killing at least 22 people and leveling houses there, police and residents said. An American official said the target was a known hideout of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s terror network.
It was the first significant US military action in the city since Marines ended a bloody three-week siege against the insurgents. Since the forces left, residents have said that extremist influence in the Sunni Muslim city, west of Baghdad, has only grown.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy operations chief, said the United States used “precision weapons” to attack the suspected al-Zarqawi hideout and that the blast caused “multiple secondary explosions” of ammunition and roadside bomb materials stored there. There was no way to confirm the US claim that al-Zarqawi’s group used the house.
Kimmitt said “significant intelligence... from multiple sources suggested that a significant number of people in the Zarqawi network were in this house... at the time of the attack.” He would not provide further details of the attack and would not say whether it was carried out by aircraft.
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US officials said it was unknown whether al-Zarqawi was there. They said al-Zarqawi’s death would be a significant blow to the insurgency but would not bring it to an end.
In Fallujah, rescue workers combed the scene, searching the rubble for other victims. Slabs of concrete and steel reinforcing bars were upended and twisted. Outraged residents accused the Americans of trying to inflict maximum damaged by firing two strikes, one first to attack and another to kill the rescuers.
In southern Iraq, a roadside bomb killed at least two people, including a Portuguese security official working for the state-run Oil Products Co. and an Iraqi policeman guarding him, police Capt. Diaa Hussein said. The Portugese Foreign Ministry confirmed the death of the Portuguese citizen, Antonio Jose Monteiro Abelha, 36. The two were driving on a road from the southern city of Basra to nearby Zubayr when the blast destroyed their vehicle.