US Troops Who Criticised Iraq War Strategy Killed in Baghdad

Two US soldiers who helped write a critique from the front saying America had "failed on every promise" in the war have been killed in Iraq, it was reported yesterday.

Staff Sergeant Yance Gray, 26, and Sergeant Omar Mora, 28, were among a group of seven soldiers serving in Iraq who wrote a piece excoriating America's conduct of the war. The piece was published in the New York Times last month.

The men were killed in Baghdad when the cargo truck in which they were riding rolled over, the Associated Press and local news outlets reported yesterday. The Pentagon had yet to confirm their deaths early yesterday.

The criticism caused a flurry of public debate because of the candor with which the men, all serving in the 82nd Airborne, described the situation in Iraq.

There was also speculation they could face severe penalties for being so openly critical of the war. Another US soldier, Private Scott Beauchamp, who wrote a shocking account in New Republic magazine about a soldier treating a piece of a child's skull as a souvenir, had his mobile phone and laptop confiscated.

"Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise," the seven wrote. "When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages."

The peril of service in Iraq was underlined during the course of writing the article: one of the co-authors, a Ranger, was shot in the head and flown to the US for treatment.

The men directly challenged official claims of progress in the war, calling the debate in Washington "surreal".

They also skewered the military's only real success story from the war - much discussed this week in congressional hearings on the war - the decision by Sunni groups in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, to join the fight against al-Qaida. "Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence," the men wrote.

"We operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies."

The men's deaths were reported the day before George Bush is due to give a televised address in which he will try to persuade a war-weary public to support the war at least until the middle of next year. Mr Bush is expected to announce the withdrawal of 30,000 troops over the next nine months, which will bring US force strength to the levels earlier this year. But he is also expected to say he does not envisage the bulk of US forces leaving Iraq before he leaves the White House in January 2009.

In their testimony to Congress this week, General Davis Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador, accused Iran of arming and training Shia militias to fight a "proxy war" that risks further destabilizing Iraq.

Yesterday, Gen Petraeus told a press conference that Iran was attempting to create a Hizbullah-like force that was trying to exert influence in Iraq.

Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, amplified that warning.

"Iran is a very troublesome neighbor," she told NBC television yesterday, warning that Tehran would try to fill any power vacuum created by the withdrawal of US forces. "What we are prepared to do is to complete the security gains that we've been making, to create circumstances in which an Iraqi government and local officials can find political accommodation, as they are doing in Anbar, and to be able then, from Iraq, with allies in the war on terror, to resist both terrorism and Iranian aggression."