Guyana-born woman soldier injured in Iraq

GEORGETOWN, Guyana: A Guyana-born soldier serving in the US military was injured during a gunbattle with Iraqi troops near central Baghdad, her mother said yesterday.

Pfc Onica Branche, 21, a US Army food specialist based in Fort Stewart, Georgia, sustained serious facial injuries during fighting on Sunday, her mother, Patricia Branche, said by telephone from her home in West Hempstead, New York. Branche had been talking on the phone with her mother when the battle started. “We were on the telephone speaking when it went dead and I knew as a mother that something had gone wrong,” Patricia Branche said. The military said her daughter would be flown this week to an American base in Germany for medical treatment, but gave her no further details, she said.

Pentagon officials decline to comment on the specifics of wounded soldiers. As of yesterday, 342 US troops had been wounded in Iraq, Pentagon spokesman Maj Ted Wadsworth said. Onica Branche grew up in Guyana in the western town of Johanna Cecelia but left with her parents for New York in 2001 and joined the US military hoping to receive a scholarship to study nutrition at a US university. Branche, who has three older sisters still living in the South American country, is among the 31,000 non-citizens serving in the US military.