IRAQ: Two British soldiers killed in roadside bomb in Basra and a mass grave is discovered in Kirkuk

A roadside bomb blasted a British patrol near the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Monday (September 4), killing two soldiers and seriously wounding a third, a British military spokesman said. The soldiers were attacked as they escorted a reconstruction team near al-Dayr, 15 km north of Basra, Major Charlie Burbridge said. A fourth soldier suffered minor injuries. The explosion blew the soldiers' armoured landrover off the road, ripping the roof apart and crumpling the front of the vehicle, Reuters reporters at the scene said. A Royal Navy Sea King helicopter evacuated the bodies and the wounded as Danish troops secured the area. The deaths brought to 117 the number of British soldiers killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The Ministry of Defence in London earlier reported that the blast had been followed by machine-gun fire, but Burbridge said the shooting had been a separate incident. The mainly Shi'ite south, where 7,000 British troops are based, has been far more peaceful than Sunni-dominated and ethnically mixed provinces in the centre of the country, but there has been a surge in violence in Basra in the past year. A senior British commander said last month Britain may cut its force in half by the middle of next year after handing over security responsibility for the south to Iraqi forces. Earlier, a car bomb exploded near a passing police patrol in central Baghdad, wounding two policemen and one civilian, police sources said. The blast took place in Al-Watheq Street, a frequent route for police patrols. However, witnesses said the blast targeted civilians. Iraqi officials said they found the skeletal remains of 18 people in what they described as a mass grave near the northern oil rich city of Kirkuk on Monday (September 4), officials said. The remains were unearthed from a mass grave near a military base in Tabzawa, 15 kilometres southwest of Kirkuk. Clothing found with the bodies indicated that they are all Kurds and they included men, women and children. "According to our sources in the area we were able to allocate the site of the mass graves and we unearthed remains of 18 bodies, most of them children and women wearing kurdish clothing," said Sallar, deputy head of the city's intelligence service. He said that forensic examinations would be carried out to determine when they were killed. Some 300 possible mass graves have been reported since Saddam's fall in April 2003, many in southern Shi'ite areas of the country and in Kurdish areas of the north. Human rights activists estimate that hundreds of thousands of people disappeared during Saddam's rule.

ITN Source | September 4, 2006

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