Insurgents' blasts damage 5 Iraqi Christian churches

BAGHDAD -- Explosions damaged churches in Baghdad yesterday, and the US military reported the deaths of six more American troops across the country.

A suicide car bomber killed three US troops and an Iraqi civilian in Qaim, near the Syrian border Friday. Another American died after a car bomb blast in Mosul the same day.

A mortar attack on Qaim also killed four Iraqis and wounded 30 yesterday, a local hospital doctor said.

Late yesterday, two Army helicopters crashed in southwest Baghdad, killing two soldiers and wounding two others, the US military said. The First Cavalry Division said the cause of the crashes had not been determined.

The US military denied reports carried by Kuwait's official news agency KUNA that Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and nine others had been captured by US forces during raids on homes in Fallujah on Friday.

''We have heard those reports, and we do not believe they are true," said Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, a US military spokesman in Baghdad. ''We have been in contact with the Marines based around Fallujah, and we have heard nothing about those reports through our channels."

In another challenge for the US-backed interim government, a group led by Zarqawi vowed to attack foreign trucks bringing gasoline and diesel fuel into Iraq.

Five churches were hit in a string of bomb attacks before dawn that seemed designed to intimidate the country's small, deeply rooted Christian community, which was shaken by a series of bombings of churches that killed 11 people in August.

''If they don't want us in Iraq, let them say it, and we will leave," said Samir Hermiz, 40, standing by a Catholic church reduced to ashes. ''I'm really thinking of leaving Iraq."

Iraq's 650,000 Christians, about 3 percent of the population, are mostly Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Catholics.

The US military has accused Zarqawi of carrying out bombings aimed at fueling sectarian strife and civil war. Some Iraqis say that Washington has exaggerated the threat from Zarqawi to disguise the strength of Iraq's homegrown insurgency.

Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad group claimed responsibility for Thursday's suicide bombings that killed up to four Americans in the heart of Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, seat of the government and home to the US and British embassies.

A Tawhid and Jihad pamphlet, shown by an Oil Ministry official, said non-Iraqi trucks bringing in imported gasoline and diesel fuel would be ''subject to destruction."

The pamphlet was distributed to oil officials in Mosul and elsewhere in the north and to traders importing oil products.

The government, trying to stamp its authority on Iraq before January elections, told the rebel-held city of Fallujah on Wednesday to hand over Zarqawi and his men, said by the US military to be holed up there, or face assault.

US Marines, backed by Iraqi forces, said they had set up what they called a dynamic cordon around Fallujah since Thursday, setting up checkpoints and carrying out ground assaults on objectives outside the city's confines.

Residents said Fallujah, 32 miles west of Baghdad, was quieter after heavy US air strikes and ground operations aimed at Zarqawi targets Thursday and Friday.

But they said US forces bombarded western Fallujah, destroying a house and killing an infant girl yesterday. Three other children and a woman were wounded.

The US military said recent air raids were intended to thwart attacks it said Zarqawi's network was planning during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which has just begun.

Fears of a looming confrontation in Fallujah rose Friday when US forces detained Khaled al-Jumaili, a cleric who had been the city's leading negotiator in talks with the government.

In Baghdad, a rocket or mortar round that hit the compound of the Ibn al-Bitar Hospital killed one person and wounded five.