Iraq Battle(s) For an Iranian Colony?

Six U.S. Soldiers Killed In Iraq
BAGHDAD, April 8, 2007(CBS/AP) Six U.S. soldiers died in Iraq on Sunday, the U.S. military announced.

Three were killed by a roadside bomb during a patrol south of Baghdad, the military said. One soldier was wounded in that incident.

Another soldier died and three were wounded by a mortar or rocket attack in a separate incident south of the capital, the military said in another statement.

Two more soldiers died Sunday from wounds sustained in combat, the military said — one each in Diyala and Salahuddin provinces, both north of Baghdad.

Earlier, the military announced that four U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday in an explosion near their vehicle in Diyala. Another soldier was also wounded in the attack, and evacuated to a U.S. military hospital, a statement said.

The victims' names were withheld pending family notification.

At least 3,280 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.

Violence in Iraq remained as relentless as the deepening debate in the United States about the way forward in the war four years after Marines and the Army's 3rd Infantry Division swept into the Iraqi capital 20 days into the American invasion.

In Other Developments:

# The powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his militiamen on Sunday to redouble their battle to oust American forces and argued that Iraq's army and police should join him in defeating "your archenemy."

# Security remained so tenuous in the capital on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. capture of Baghdad that Iraq's military declared a 24-hour ban on all vehicles in the capital from 5 a.m. Monday. The government quickly reinstated Monday as a holiday, just a day after it had decreed that April 9 no longer would be a day off.

# The Senate will not stop paying for the Iraq war nor relent from insisting that President George W. Bush keep pressing the Baghdad government for a negotiated end to the violence, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, said Sunday.

# Iran's foreign minister warned Sunday that cooperation with Iraq could deteriorate if five Iranian diplomats detained by U.S. troops in Iraq are not set free.


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