Women, children taken in Iraq battle

Al Qaeda fighters kidnapped 15 Iraqi women and children after rival Sunni Arab militants repelled their attack on two villages in a fierce battle on Thursday in which 32 people were killed, police said.
The fighting, rare on such a large scale, underscored the growing split between Sunni Arab militant groups and al Qaeda that U.S. forces have sought to exploit as they try to quell sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands.
U.S. President George W. Bush, under pressure to show progress in the war or start bringing troops home, on Wednesday compared Iraq to Vietnam in urging Americans to be patient. His administration had previously avoided such comparisons, saying there were few parallels.
Many U.S. Democrats have likened Iraq to Vietnam, calling the war a quagmire that has exacted a toll in American lives and money without furthering U.S. interests.
About 200 al Qaeda fighters raided the villages of Sheikh Tamim and Ibrahim Yehia in restive Diyala province, north of Baghdad, in the early hours of Thursday after launching a mortar attack on the area, police said.
The attack came despite a U.S. offensive in Diyala targeting al Qaeda. U.S. troops launched an operation in June to oust fighters who had taken over large parts of the provincial capital, Baquba. Many escaped to fight on.
Brigadier-General Ali Delayan, the police chief of Baquba, told Reuters that 22 residents had been killed in the fighting along with 10 al Qaeda fighters.
Several wounded residents said villagers were loyal to the Sunni Arab insurgent group, the 1920 Revolution Brigade.
Delayan said the attackers had escaped with eight women and seven children as hostages.
A mosque that served the two villages was destroyed in the fighting and its imam was among those killed, he added.
Delayan said the al Qaeda attackers mortared the villages before storming into them. Rocket-propelled grenades were used in the fighting, in which three houses were destroyed.
He said the gun battle with fighters loyal to the 1920 Revolution Brigade, which has recently distanced itself from al Qaeda, was triggered by the execution of four men, including the mosque imam.
Police said they arrested 22 of the attackers.
LUKEWARM SUPPORT FOR MALIKI
The Shi'ite-led government and the U.S. military still view al Qaeda as the main threat to peace in Iraq, despite the fact that is fighters make up only a small percentage of Sunni Arab militants and many of its leaders have been killed or captured.
The group is foreign-led, although many fighters are Iraqi. Most suicide car bomb attacks responsible for large-scale casualties are blamed on al Qaeda. The U.S. military says the bombers are normally foreign and cross into Iraq through Syria.
Washington has built up its forces in Iraq to 160,000 to help curb sectarian violence and give Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government breathing space to forge a political compromise among the warring sects.
But the U.S. ambassador this week criticized the pace of political progress as "extremely disappointing", and Bush himself offered only lukewarm support for Maliki, saying there was frustration over the slow pace of reform.
Analysts, however, note that there are few viable alternative leaders to Maliki, who hit back at the criticism by saying no one outside Iraq had the right to set timetables.
In arguing for perseverance in Iraq on Wednesday, Bush said it was in U.S. interests not to withdraw from Iraq too soon. He raised the example of the emergence of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and violence in Vietnam after U.S. troops pulled out.
"Like our enemies in the past, the terrorists who wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places seek to spread a political vision of their own: a harsh plan for life that crushes freedom, tolerance and dissent," he said.