Coalition death toll in Iraq hits 4,000

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The number of coalition military deaths in the war in Iraq has reached 4,000.



The gloomy milestone was reached as a U.S. general said there has been a rise in insurgents booby-trapping houses.

Most of the fatalities throughout the Iraq war have been U.S. military service members, with 3,705 deaths. That number also includes seven civilians working for the Pentagon.

The nearly 300 others hail from countries, such as Italy, Poland and Ukraine, that have supported the U.S. effort, which began in March 2003.

The numbers are based on a CNN Library count of official figures from the various countries involved in the Iraq war.

On Friday a roadside bombing killed a U.S. soldier in eastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said. Two others were wounded. They were all from Multi-National Division-Baghdad.

Three U.S. soldiers died in Baghdad on Thursday, the U.S. military said. Two of the dead died from a "non-battle related cause." In addition, a Task Force Lightning soldier was killed by enemy gunfire in Baghdad province.

Forty-six U.S. troops have died this month. Britain, which has command of coalition troops in southern Iraq, has suffered 168 deaths, 132 of them in hostile circumstances.

The United States has about 162,000 troops in Iraq; 11,500 are from other countries, the State Department says.

Next month, Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker are scheduled to present a progress report on Iraq to Congress.

While debate continues as to whether the deployment of more U.S. troops to Iraq is working, insurgents are stepping up their efforts by rigging bombs in houses that U.S. and Iraqi soldiers try to enter and clear. See a timeline of deadliest attacks in Iraq »

Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, director for operations for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, described a few recent instances in which improvised explosive devices have gone off in buildings where there were U.S. and Iraqi soldiers.

"It has occurred in Baghdad and in other sites as well," Ham said.

The devices are set up like booby traps, but with a large explosive similar to those used in roadside bombs, he said. He does not know if any of the home booby traps have used armor-piercing devices.

Meanwhile, a coordinated attack against the Yazidi minority, which killed 500 civilians, was described by Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon as an attempt to influence U.S. public opinion.

Tuesday's truck bombs that targeted the villages of Qahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair, in northern Iraq near the border with Syria, were a "trademark al Qaeda event" designed to sway U.S. public opinion against the war, Mixon said Wednesday. Watch the grim aftermath of the suicide bombings

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He called the attacks on Kurdish villages of the Yazidi religious minority "ethnic cleansing." There has been very little security in the area where the bombs exploded, officials say. Sunni extremists have been blamed for the attacks.

Mixon said the car bombings were attempts to "break the will" of the American people and show that the U.S. troop escalation -- the "surge" -- is failing.

In another blast Thursday morning, a bomb in a parked car exploded at a busy shopping center in central Baghdad, killing at least nine people and wounding 17, Iraq's Ministry of Information said

In Diyala province Wednesday, the U.S. military reported 21 insurgents killed in an "unprecedented combined action" effort of Iraqi police and citizen volunteers.

The joint force of police and the volunteers, who call themselves the Baquba Guardians, "defeated a coordinated attack" by 40 to 60 "al Qaeda terrorists" in the southern Buhriz region near Baquba, the U.S. military said in a Thursday statement. Coalition attack helicopters backed up the fighters.

The U.S. military is leading two major offensives against Diyala insurgents -- Arrowhead Ripper in Baquba and Lightning Hammer in the Diyala River valley.

"Baquba should be proud of their security forces and their citizen guardians today," said Col. Steve Townsend, commander, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division.

"All fought side-by-side and soundly defeated a complex attack from a determined enemy. This thing could have been much worse had those suicide bombers reached their targets."

"We still have a great deal of work to do against al Qaeda in Iraq, and we have great deal of work to do against al Qaeda networks in northern Iraq," Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesman, said Wednesday.

The number of U.S. military deaths stands at 3,705, and the number in August so far is 47, according to a CNN count of Pentagon figures.

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