Marines and Iraqis launch new offensive

U.S. Army soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 24 Infantry Regiment search for insurgents in Mosul, Iraq, Monday. U.S. and Iraqi forces in Mosul have been working to put down an uprising launched by guerrillas who seized police stations and other sites. (AP Photo/Jim MacMillan)

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Some 5,000 U.S. Marines, British troops and Iraqi commandos launched raids and arrested suspected insurgents Tuesday in a new offensive aimed at clearing a swath of insurgent hotbeds south of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

U.S. Army Capt. Andrew Wagner relaxes on an army cot at Lawson Army Airfield at Fort Benning, Ga., Tuesday, while waiting to deploy to Iraq. (AP Photo/Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Mike Haskey) In other violence, masked gunmen assassinated a Sunni cleric north of Baghdad — the second such killing in as many days — and insurgents hit a U.S. convoy with a roadside bomb near the central Iraq city of Samarra, prompting the Americans to open fire, killing an Iraqi, hospital officials said.

The new offensive was the third large-scale military assault this month aimed at suppressing Iraq’s persistent insurgency ahead of crucial elections set for Jan. 30.

The region of dusty, small towns south of the capital has become known as the ‘‘triangle of death’’ for the frequent attacks by car bombs, rockets, and small arms on U.S. and Iraqi forces there and for frequent ambushes on travelers.

The military said violence has surged in the area in recent weeks in an apparent attempt to divert attention away from the U.S. assault on Fallujah.

The joint operation kicked off with early morning raids in the town of Jabella, 50 miles south of Baghdad, netting 32 suspected insurgents, the U.S. military said in a statement. U.S. and Iraqi forces were conducting house-to-house searches and vehicle checkpoints.

In the past three weeks, Iraqi troops and Marines have detained nearly 250 insurgents, the statement said.

They have been aided by British forces from the 1st Battalion of the Black Watch Regiment, who were brought to the area from southern Basra to aid U.S. forces in closing off militant escape routes between Baghdad, Babil province to the south and Anbar province to the west.

The massive Fallujah invasion — involving some 10,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops — has left the former guerrilla stronghold mostly in U.S. hands, though fighting with pockets of gunmen has been going on for days, the military has said. More than 50 U.S. servicemembers were killed and more than 400 wounded in the operation.

Earlier this month, the northern city of Mosul witnessed a mass insurgent uprising in apparent support of Fallujah’s guerrillas. Some 2,400 U.S. troops were sent in to retake control over western parts of the city.

The slain Sunni cleric, Sheik Ghalib Ali al-Zuhairi, was shot as he left a mosque in the town of Muqdadiyah, 60 miles north of Baghdad, said police Col. Raisan Hussein.

Al-Zuhairi was a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential group that has called for a boycott of nationwide elections.

A day earlier, gunmen assassinated another prominent Sunni cleric in the northern city of Mosul — Sheik Faidh Mohamed Amin al-Faidhi, who was the brother of the group’s spokesman. It as unclear whether the two attacks were related.

Meanwhile, a top aide to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr accused the government of violating terms of the August agreement that ended an uprising by al-Sadr’s followers in Najaf.

Ali Smeisim, al-Sadr’s top political adviser, made no explicit threats.