Marine

BAGHDAD, May 13 — About 4,000 American ground troops supported by surveillance aircraft, attack helicopters and spy satellites swept towns and farmland south of Baghdad today searching for three American soldiers who disappeared on Saturday after their patrol was ambushed, military officials said.


The Reach of War

Related




(May 13, 2007)

The Islamic State of , an insurgent umbrella group, claimed responsibility today for the attack, which killed four American soldiers and an Iraqi Army soldier, and it said it had captured the three missing Americans. The group offered no proof for its claim.

The search for the three soldiers continued as violence flared anew in Iraq. At least 55 people were killed and 155 wounded in two vehicle bombings, one against the offices of a leading Kurdish political party in a contested region of northern Iraq and the other in a market in Shiite-dominated eastern Baghdad, Iraqi officials said.

The ambush of the Americans on Saturday morning occurred near Mahmudiya, a farming town south of the capital that has been a battleground between Sunni Arab insurgents, Shiite militias and Iraqi and American security forces.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, an American military spokesman in Baghdad, said today that three of the American soldiers killed in the attack had been identified, but that “we’re still going through the process of identifying” the fourth, suggesting that the soldier had been seriously disfigured. American officials said the soldiers were traveling in two vehicles, which burst into flames during the ambush.

The attack, and the disappearance of the soldiers, come at a critical time in the American engagement in Iraq. President Bush has ordered the deployment of about 30,000 additional American troops to Iraq and has insisted that the country can be pacified, given enough time and persistent American involvement. But the increase in American troops comes as public and Congressional support for American involvement in Iraq has waned.

American military officials said they were sparing no resources in their search for the missing soldiers.

“Everybody is fully engaged; the commanders are intimately focused on this,” Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV said at a news conference with reporters from the Iraqi news media, according to The Associated Press. He said the searchers were using “every asset we have from national assets to tactical assets.”

Two American soldiers were kidnapped last June after their unit was ambushed near Mahmudiya. Their bodies were found days later, mutilated and booby-trapped.

The Islamic State of Iraq, which includes , posted its claims of responsibility on jihadist Web sites. “Clashes between your brothers in the Islamic State of Iraq and a Crusaders’ patrol in Mahmudiya, southern Baghdad province, has led to the killing and arresting of several of them,” the group’s message said.

The suicide attack in northern Iraq killed at least 50 people and wounded at least 115, according to Brig. Gen. Mohammed al-Wagaa, an Iraqi Army commander in Mosul. It occurred just south of the border of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan, in the town of Makhmur, which has a sizable Kurdish population.

In the attack, a man drove his explosives-laden car into the main gate of a compound that includes the offices of Makhmur’s mayor and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the organization led by Massoud Barzani, president of Kurdistan.

It was the second vehicle bombing in five days against Kurdish targets in northern Iraq, suggesting the beginning of a terrorist offensive against the Kurdish authorities.

The blast destroyed several buildings and houses, “many cars” and a gasoline station, according to Abdulrahman Belaf, the mayor of Makhmur, who was in his office at the time and was wounded in the attack. The town’s police chief died in the blast, officials said.

Makhmur falls within a region that the Kurdish authorities want to annex as part of an expanded Kurdistan. The Iraqi Constitution calls for a referendum before the end of year on whether a swath of territory in three northern Iraqi provinces, including the oil capital of Kirkuk, should become part of Kurdistan.

American and Iraqi officials say they expect a sharp rise in violence as the referendum nears, led mainly by Sunni Arab insurgents opposed to the expansion of Kurdistan’s borders.

Kurdish officials said today that they did not yet know who was responsible for the attack in Makhmur or whether it was related to an attack last week in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan, in which a truck loaded with explosives detonated in front of offices of the Kurdish regional government, killing at least 19 people and wounding more than 70.

The Makhmur bombing was the deadliest attack of the day in Iraq today.

In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded at the Sadriya market in a predominantly Shiite quarter of eastern Baghdad, killing at least five people and wounding 40, an official at the Interior Ministry said.

The neighborhood has been a repeated target of attacks in recent months. On April 18, at least 140 people were killed and 150 people were wounded when a bomb exploded in an informal bus station near the market. On Feb. 3, a truck bombing killed at least 137 people, wounded 305 and obliterated part of the market.

In another attack today, gunmen broke into a flour factory in the Uaireej region south of Baghdad and killed five people and wounded four, the Interior Ministry official said.

Reporting was contributed by Yerevan Adham from Erbil, Damien Cave and Wisam A. Habeeb from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Mosul.