U.S. kills six Iraqi policemen in Baghdad raid

By Alister Bull

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. soldiers killed at least 13 people including six Iraqi policemen after coming under fire from a police checkpoint in Baghdad on Friday, the U.S. military said.

An Iraqi reporter working for The New York Times was also shot dead on his way to work in Baghdad, the newspaper said, a day after two Reuters employees were killed during an incident involving U.S. forces in the city.

Khalid Hassan, 23, was shot in the southern Saidiya district of the capital, the Times said in a statement, adding that the circumstances of the attack were unclear.

A U.S. warplane made a strike during the raid in mainly Shi'ite east Baghdad after U.S. soldiers came under "heavy and accurate" gunfire from a police checkpoint, rooftops and a church, the military said in a statement.

Seven suspected militants were also killed during the clash, in which U.S. soldiers detained an Iraqi police lieutenant on suspicion of planning roadside bomb and mortar attacks on U.S. forces. The military accused him of links with Iranians accused by Washington of fomenting violence in Iraq.

"When they (U.S. forces) went to arrest this lieutenant, some of the police who were with him began firing on our folks," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Washington.

"That turned those individuals into enemy and legitimate folks for our troops to take on in combat."

U.S. commanders say elements of the police are infiltrated by sectarian militia, making it harder to restore security and ease tension between majority Shi'ite and minority Sunni Arabs.

Pace also said that the number of Iraqi army battalions that operate independently, with no assistance from U.S. forces, had dropped from 10 to six over the last two months, although he downplayed the change as partly due to temporary factors.

The relentless violence is raising pressure on U.S. President George W. Bush to start withdrawing U.S. troops, less than a month after all of an additional 28,000 troops arrived as part of a new attempt to boost security.

The Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives voted for a withdrawal of combat troops by April 1, 2008, on Thursday in a largely symbolic gesture. Bush has vetoed previous congressional efforts to place a timetable on the war.

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U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended Iraq's mixed report in an interim report released this week, saying in a series of television interviews the Bush administration needs two more months to find a "coherent way forward."

"Right now we are still in the midst of the new strategy," Rice told ABC's "Good Morning America."

Shrugging aside critics, Bush said on Thursday he would wait for a September report from his top commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.