By Peter Graff BAGHDAD, Jan 9 (Reuters) - U.S. forces in Iraq are focusing their latest major operation on al Qaeda guerrillas who regrouped north of Baghdad after fleeing other parts of the country, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq said on Wednesday. Major-General Michael Hertling said 24,000 U.S. troops and 50,000 Iraqi army soldiers were participating in Operation Iron Harvest in four provinces north of Baghdad. The operation is part of a wider offensive called Operation Phantom Phoenix which U.S. commanders announced on Tuesday in Baghdad and its southern outskirts as well as the north. Hertling said the main northern effort was in Diyala province, an ethnically mixed and volatile area which he said al Qaeda considers the capital of its Islamic Caliphate. A brigade of about 5,000 U.S. troops and a division of Iraqis had launched assaults near Muqdadiya in a fertile part of the Diyala River valley known as the bread basket. Hertling said they had run into lighter opposition than they expected, with guerrillas apparently withdrawing from villages as the Americans advanced. He said Iraqi military reports that about 20-30 militants had been killed "sound about right". U.S. forces say al Qaeda Sunni Arab militants have regrouped in northern Diyala, Salahuddin and Nineveh provinces after being driven from western Anbar province and Baghdad. The U.S. military said three of its soldiers were killed and two were wounded in an attack while conducting operations in Salahuddin on Tuesday. "The people that left Anbar and Baghdad have moved up into my area," Hertling, whose northern area covers Diyala, Salahuddin, Nineveh and Kirkuk provinces, told a briefing. ADDITIONAL FORCES IN NORTH Hertling said additional troops were being sent into his northern area, which in previous years was a "force economy region" with a lighter U.S. contingent than elsewhere. "I've got enough to do what we need to be doing right now," he said, declining to give details on the additional forces. U.S. forces have acknowledged an increase in so-called "spectacular" attacks -- mainly large-scale suicide bombings -- in recent weeks despite an overall decline in violence. Increasingly, strikes have hit volunteer security patrols, which U.S. forces refer to as "concerned local citizens" and pay to guard neighbourhoods against al Qaeda. Hertling said five severed heads had been found on a road in Diyala with warnings in Arabic written in blood on their foreheads that all volunteers would share their fate. "I think these spectacular attacks of suicide bombers and suicide vests are in fact going to be AQI's Achilles' heel," he said, referring to al Qaeda in Iraq. "They are going to continue to kill innocent people, and that in fact is what is generating the concerned local citizens in the first place." Northern provinces are also among the most ethnically and religiously diverse, which Hertling said can lead to tension. In Kirkuk bombers struck two churches on Wednesday, wounding three people and causing damage to the buildings. Those strikes followed a campaign of seven strikes on Christian targets in Baghdad and Mosul on Sunday, which wounded four people in total. The recent strikes on churches have so far hit when buildings were empty, leaving few casualties but renewing fears of sectarian violence against Iraq's small Christian community, about 3 percent of its 27 million mainly Muslim population. (Additional reporting by Mustafa Mahmoud in Kirkuk)
A boy plays with a ball in front of his house in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir January 6, 2008. Clearing debris from a bombing, residents of the largest city ...
