By Xinhua
Baghdad : Five U.S. servicemen were killed Monday in a roadside bomb ambush in northern Iraqi province of Nineveh, the U.S. military said.
The military said they were killed near the volatile capital city of Mosul when their patrol was hit by the blast and small arms fire.
The attack was the deadliest since Jan. 9 when six U.S. troops were killed and four others injured in a booby-trapped house in the Diyala province.
The two provinces are the focal point in the newly-launched sweeping military operation across Iraq against al-Qaida and other insurgents.
Mosul, some 390 km north of Baghdad, is Iraq’s third-largest city, which is among the most-hit areas by violence despite a security pickup in most of Iraq.
A huge blast at a deserted residential building killed at least36 people and left more than 200 injured last Wednesday in the city when the Iraqi security troops were poised to search for a reported ammunition cache inside.
The province’s police chief died from a suicide bombing the next day on the scene on an inspection tour.
The incidents have prompted the Iraqi government to send extra troops to Mosul for what Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki termed as a “decisive battle” against insurgents.
More than 3,930 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.