THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

From the AP we learn that it is business as usual .

U.S. Marines and Iraqi forces battled insurgents on two fronts Saturday in a restive western province, killing about 50 militants in a dusty frontier town in the military's latest campaign to stop foreign fighters infiltrating from neighboring Syria.

The military also announced Saturday that two U.S. soldiers were killed and one was wounded during a small-arms skirmish with insurgents late Friday while transporting a detainee near Buhriz, about 35 miles north of Baghdad. A civilian and the detainee also were killed, and five Iraqi police officers were wounded.

At least 1,718 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

In Karabilah, Marines and Iraqi forces fought their way into the town. On Friday, U.S. fighter aircraft dropped bombs and the tanks fired shells at insurgents holed up inside buildings.

In other violence Saturday, insurgents killed at least four people in Baghdad, including two Iraqi soldiers and a 10-year-old girl, hospital and police officials said. Twenty people - including an Iraqi journalist - were wounded.

The girl was killed and two people were wounded when a roadside bomb missed a passing American military convoy, said Dr. Muhand Jawad of Baghdad's Al-Yarmouk hospital.

A suicide car bomber slammed into an Iraqi army convoy in the Yarmouk neighborhood, killing two soldiers and wounding six near a dangerous highway - also known as the Street of Death - leading from downtown to the airport, police Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said.

An Iraqi reporter working for the Saudi-owned television network Al-Arabiya was shot in the neck while leaving a Baghdad restaurant, the station said. Jawad Khadim, believed to be in his mid-30s, was seriously wounded.

The body of a Sunni tribal leader also was found Saturday outside Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Sheikh Arkan Shaalan Jassim al-Edwan, who had been shot, was sprawled on a roadside portrait of Saddam Hussein, police Lt. Adnan Abdullah said.

And Our Dear Leader has still not told us his real reason why we are in Iraq.