A suicide truck bomber struck a strategic bridge outside Baghdad on Tuesday, sending vehicles plunging into the river and killing at least 10 people in the second attack on the span in three months, police said. The attack came as 16,000 US and Iraqi troops began a new operation north of the Iraqi capital targeting insurgents who have fled a crackdown in the restive city of Baqouba, the military said Tuesday. On the political front, leaders of Iraq's divided factions held a flurry of meetings in preparation for a crisis council planned by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as he seeks to save his crumbling government, which faces allegations of a Shiite bias. "I think that the circumstances require us to do our best to bring the country out of this difficult situation," Iraq's Sunni Vice President Tariq Hashemi told reporters after holding talks with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, who traveled from his autonomous northern region to Baghdad this week to help broker a compromise .
The Thiraa Dijla bridge in Taji, a town near a US air base some 20 kilometers north of the capital, came under attack around noon, police said, giving the casualty toll. The bridge, which stretched across a canal on the main highway that links Baghdad with the northern city of Mosul, was bombed three months ago and only one lane had reopened, according to the police officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information. The attacker detonated his payload in the middle of the bridge after avoiding an Iraqi army checkpoint that was only monitoring traffic going the other direction, a police officer said, adding that 40 meters of the bridge had collapsed. Rescue crews were trying to recover bodies trapped inside three minibuses and the truck that had fallen into the canal, which links the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, the officials said. US and Iraqi troops cordoned off the area to evacuate the wounded, the military said, without providing a casualty toll.
The US and Iraq operation farther north of the capital, dubbed Operation Lightning Hammer, began late Monday with an air assault and was part of a broader US push announced Monday to build on successes in Baghdad and surrounding areas by targeting al-Qaida in Iraq and Iranian-allied Shiite militia fighters nationwide.
Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of US forces in northern Iraq, said the troops were pursuing al-Qaida cells that had been disrupted and forced into hiding by previous operations. "Our main goal with Lightning Hammer is to eliminate the terrorist organizations ... and show them that they truly have no safe haven - especially in Diyala," he said in a statement.
Four more US soldiers were reported killed in separate attacks - three in an explosion near their vehicle Monday in the northwestern Ninevah province and another who was died of wounds sustained during combat operations in western Baghdad.
A US transport helicopter also went down Tuesday near the Taqaddum air base, west of Baghdad, the military said. The CH-47 Chinook helicopter was conducting a routine post-maintenance test flight when it went down in Anbar province, Marine spokesman 1st Lt. Shawn Mercer said, adding the site had been sealed off and the cause was being investigated. He gave no immediate information about how many people were on the helicopter or their status.
Local officials, meanwhile, said four civilians, including a young girl, were killed and five wounded Tuesday during a raid by joint US-Iraqi forces in Baghdad's Shiite district of Sadr City. The US military said four gunmen were killed and eight detained after a fierce gunfight, but it had no reports of civilian deaths.