HUSAYBA, Iraq, Nov. 9 - The American military command said today that some residents had been killed and wounded during heavy fighting here, the first such acknowledgement of civilian casualties since the Marines moved into this town last Saturday to try to choke off the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.
A Marine statement said that according to a witness, rebels broke into a family's home, killed two of its occupants and locked the survivors in a room. The insurgents then used the house to launch attacks on advancing American and Iraqi troops, the Marines said. Unaware that civilians were in the house, the statement continued, Marine aircraft bombed it on Monday, reducing it to rubble.
The Marines said they were alerted to the problem Tuesday evening. American and Iraqi troops excavating the site have recovered five bodies and rescued two wounded people, a man and a young girl, the military said.
The American military command has repeatedly asserted that it goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties by weighing intelligence and following strict protocols, and says its bombs are capable of near-pinpoint precision.
But civilian casualties, particularly if the numbers grow as residents continue to sift through the debris of leveled buildings, could dilute American efforts to win the people's trust and to undercut the insurgency's influence.
A spokesman for the Second Marine Division, Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, said in a statement that the Marines and the Iraqi forces working with them here were unclear "why insurgents used this particular house, which was occupied, when there were so many homes in the area that were abandoned."
The Marine commander of the joint assault force here, Col. Stephen W. Davis, said in a brief interview that civilians wounded in the campaign had been arriving at military clinics for treatment. But he did not say how many there were.
In Baghdad, two car bombs exploded in rapid succession in a Shiite neighborhood this evening, killing 7 people and wounding 30, an Interior Ministry official said.
The first bomb, which was thought to have been remotely detonated, exploded at 7:30 p.m. near the Sharufi mosque in Shaab, a Shiite district in northeastern Baghdad. The second bomb detonated minutes later, the official said. The exterior of the mosque was damaged.
In recent months, Iraq's insurgency, led by radical Sunni Arabs, has pursued a strategy of killing Shiite civilians in an effort to ignite a civil war here.
The sweep in Husayba and its eastern environs, has featured scores of high-powered aerial and ground attacks on suspected insurgent safehouses, combat positions and bomb-making workshops.
The Marines have attacked buildings with 500-pound bombs dropped by F-18 fighter jets, Hellfire missiles launched by Super Cobra attack helicopters, and tank shells and shoulder-fired missiles.
Marines, assisted by Iraqi troops, continued to sweep the region to the east of Husayba today in their effort to sever what officials regard as a key nexus in a smuggling network that moves foreign fighters and munitions from Syria to central Iraq along the Euphrates River corridor.
In house-by-house searches today, marines found new weapons stockpiles and detained more suspected insurgents, the Marines said. To the north of the town, they added, marines discovered a house that had been booby-trapped with homemade bombs, presumably intended for American and Iraqi troops.
In violence elsewhere in the country, a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb near an Iraqi police convoy in the city of Baquba this morning, killing seven police officers and wounding six, an Interior Ministry official said. A civilian was also wounded.
In Baghdad, gunmen shot and killed a driver for the Sudanese Embassy at 10:30 a.m., an embassy official said. The men had tried to kidnap the driver, Hammouda Ahmed Adam, but witnesses said he resisted and was shot dead, the official said. There have been a spate of killings and kidnappings of diplomats from Arab countries, as insurgents try to stop Arab countries from forging relations with Iraq's new government.
American forces also pressed their campaign against insurgents in Ramadi, the volatile capital of Anbar Province. The military said that on Saturday, soldiers in Ramadi captured Majid Adnon Swedowi, described as a senior insurgent leader.
A marine died on Tuesday from injuries he sustained on Monday when his vehicle hit a homemade bomb near an American base in western Anbar Province, the military announced.
And Colonel Davis said that a pressure-sensitive bomb buried in a dirt road had exploded beneath a Humvee in his convoy as it traveled between Al Qaim military base and the battlefield in Husayba. Three Marines were seriously wounded and two were slightly wounding two, said the colonel, who was in another vehicle and was not hurt.
Soon after, two more Marines were wounded when a vehicle in a rescue convoy drove over another pressure-sensitive mine buried near the site of the first attack, officials said.