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U.S. forces suffer new casualties

Oct-15-2004 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

I forgot to post this article yesterday by Michael Gilbert regarding the incidents on Monday and Wednesday.

[Link to Full Article]
MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune

Two more U.S. soldiers were killed and five wounded Wednesday in Mosul in another suicide car-bomb attack – the second fatal strike in three days.

This time an insurgent drove a car packed with explosives into an Army convoy about 2:20 p.m. Mosul time, or 4:20 a.m. PDT, according to a military news release and published reports.

The attacker waited in an alley and then sped his vehicle into the second of three armored Humvees driving along a main road in the northeast section of the city, the Army Times reported. The paper has a reporter embedded with Task Force Olympia, the Fort Lewis-based headquarters in charge of coalition operations across northern Iraq.

The names of the soldiers who were killed were withheld until their families could be notified. Sources said they were Army reservists not stationed at Fort Lewis, but attached to the task force.

Wednesday’s attack – and a similar one Monday that killed a Fort Lewis cavalry scout and injured nine other local soldiers – comes as some 9,000 Fort Lewis troops are either on their way into or out of Mosul.

The 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division is being replaced after a year in Iraq by the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division in an exchange of the Army’s two Stryker brigades, both out of Fort Lewis.

Soldiers from the two brigades were riding in the Stryker that was hit Monday, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, the Task Force Olympia spokesman. The soldier who was killed, Staff Sgt. Michael Burbank of Bremerton, was standing in one of the rear hatches when a bomb-laden pickup crashed into the Stryker and exploded. He was from the 3rd Brigade’s 1st Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment.

Hastings said soldiers on the Stryker fired on the pickup as it headed toward them, but couldn’t stop it from hitting their vehicle.

The three wounded were a senior noncommissioned officer from the 1st Brigade and two other 3rd Brigade soldiers. Two were evacuated to an Army hospital in Germany, while the third was sent to an Army hospital in Baghdad, Hastings said.

Six others were also hurt but returned to duty after treatment. Hastings said that despite the blast the Stryker was driven under its own power to the field hospital at the Mosul airfield.


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