BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Five US service members were killed in a rocket attack in Iraq on Monday, in the worst single toll for American troops in the country for at least two years, the US military and Iraqi security officials said.
The attack showed Iraq’s security situation is still precarious despite a decline in violence. US troops are preparing to withdraw from the country more than eight years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The US military in Iraq gave few details, saying only that a base in eastern Baghdad came under “indirect fire”.
A senior Iraqi security official said the Americans had died when militants fired rockets into a joint base in Baghdad’s Baladiyat district in the east of the capital.
“This morning, the American base at Loyalty Camp came under rocket attack. There was a lot of smoke inside and the Americans died in that attack in the Baladiyat area,” the security official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.
Loyalty Forward Operating Base, on the former site of Saddam’s internal security directorate, is next to Sadr City, the stronghold of anti-US Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr.