Soldier killed by sniper

The U.S. military is continuing raids to root out insurgents.
KHALDIYAH, Iraq (AP) -- A sniper killed a U.S. soldier on patrol in Baghdad with a single shot, the military said today, while Iraqi officials in nearby towns were targeted by drive-by shootings likely designed to intimidate them against cooperating with Americans.
The violence came as U.S. military officials announced that American troops had detained 371 people in three days of sweeps in Baghdad and northern Iraq meant to "isolate and defeat remaining pockets of resistance that are seeking to delay the transition to a peaceful and stable Iraq."
During the attack on the U.S. soldier Monday night, the sniper escaped as the soldier collapsed on the ground. He was hustled into a military vehicle and evacuated to a first aid station but died shortly afterward, said Maj. Sean Gibson, a U.S. military spokesman.
The identity of the soldier, from the 1st Armored Division, was withheld pending notification of relatives.
Gibson said the soldier was shot in the chest, even though he was protected by body armor. The other troops on the patrol did not see the gunman, and it was not clear if they returned fire, Gibson said.
Insurgents' strikes
On Sunday, insurgents ambushed two U.S. military convoys north of Baghdad, wounding 10 soldiers and an unknown number of Iraqi civilians traveling on a bus that was passing one of the convoys.
About 50 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since major combat operations were declared over May 1, either by hostile fire or operational accidents.
In Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, suspected anti-American insurgents fired shots into the mayor's office and the courthouse. In the nearby town of Khaldiyah, more shots were fired into a police station overnight. No injuries were reported.
U.S. forces have restored the authority of local government agencies in the area, working closely with mayors to coordinate aid delivery, paying salaries for judges to resume trials and rearming Iraqi police and conducting joint patrols.
The shootings were the first known attacks directed against Iraqi officials for cooperating with U.S. forces and represented a new front in the insurgents' attempt to undermine U.S. forces in Iraq.
"There is an element of society here that doesn't want change, and they see the coalition forces as bringing change in the form of freedom and democracy," said Col. David Perkins, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade. "Anyone they think is helping with that change, they are going to try to intimidate, and that won't work."
U.S. operations
The U.S. military entered its third day of a nationwide sweep dubbed Operation Desert Scorpion that aims to arrest anti-American insurgents and find heavy weapons.
In the northern towns of Tikrit and Kirkuk, coalition forces conducted 36 raids and detained 215 individuals, said a statement from U.S. Central Command.
Troops in the Baghdad area staged 11 raids and detained 156 people, in addition to seizing 121 rifles, two submachine guns, 19 pistols, 18 rocket-propelled grenades, four machine guns, 31 pounds of explosives, and some chemical-protective masks, the statement said.
The statement did not say how many of the detainees were released, but officers on the ground said many were set free after brief interrogations clearing them of suspicion.
A U.S. officer familiar with the interrogation of the prisoners said they were supplying important information, but he declined to elaborate and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Suspects in attack
After barging into a tough Sunni Muslim neighborhood and seizing 44 men for questioning, U.S. soldiers released all but 13 today. Truckloads of medical supplies seized in the raids were to be donated to a local hospital.
The Iraqis remaining in custody included three suspected of organizing and helping to carry out a June 1 ambush on U.S. troops in the Azamiyah neighborhood.
All were being interrogated by Army counterintelligence officers, in hopes of gleaning leads to the dozen or so Iraqi irregulars who shot and tossed grenades at soldiers from the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division. The June 1 ambush at the Abu Hanifa mosque in east Baghdad injured two U.S. soldiers and sparked a firefight that killed two Iraqis.
A pair of raids Monday capped weeks of painstaking intelligence-gathering from Iraqi informants who picked out suspects' houses, as well as surveillance photos from U.S. Special Forces and satellite imagery, said Maj. Scott Bisciotti, an operations officer with the 1st Armored Division.
"We've been pursuing every lead, trying to connect all the dots and develop targets," Bisciotti said.
Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.