WASHINGTON (MSNBC) October 26, 2005 — The U.S. military announced the death of a U.S. soldier wounded in Iraq on Tuesday, bringing to 2,000 the number of American service members killed since the war started in 2003.

A Pentagon announcement Tuesday said Staff Sgt. George T. Alexander Jr., 34, of Killeen, Texas, was wounded by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad and died in Texas last weekend. Earlier Tuesday, the military announced the deaths of two Marines in fighting with insurgents last week in a village west of Baghdad.

Minutes after the 2000th death was reported, the Democratic National Committee issued a news release calling the announcement a “tragic milestone.”

The Senate held a moment of silence on the Senate floor, led by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., honoring fallen soldiers.

“Today, our nation marks one of the saddest days of the war in Iraq,” DNC Chairman Howard Dean said in the news release. “Each soldier lost on the battlefield leaves behind a family forever marked by tragedy, and scarred with grief.”

Dean said Democrats were firm in their urging for Bush to develop a plan for winning in Iraq and said his party will fight to guarantee “armed forces are never sent to war without a clear plan for victory and without the resources to carry out that strategy.”

More deaths to come, Bush says

Just before the toll hit 2,000, President Bush warned the nation to brace for an even higher casualty count as the mission there has more work remaining to be successful.

“The terrorists are as brutal an enemy as we have ever faced, unconstrained by any notion of common humanity and by the rules of warfare,” the President said in a speech before the Joint Armed Forces Officers’ Wives’ luncheon, held at Bolling Air Force Base. “No one should underestimate the difficulties ahead.”

But, Bush added: “Nor should they overlook the advantages we bring to this fight. ... Some observers look at the job ahead and adopt a self-defeating pessimism. It’s not justified.”

Meanwhile in Iraq, officials announced final results in the country’s landmark constitutional referendum. Despite an effort from Sunni Arab opponents to defeat it, Iraq’s constitution was adopted by a majority in a fair vote, officials said.

Not a milestone, Army director says

The chief spokesman for the American-led multinational force called on reporters covering not to look at the 2,000th death since March 2003 as a milestone, describing the number as an “artificial mark on the wall.”

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, director of the force’s combined press center, said via e-mail, “The 2,000th Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine that is killed in action is just as important as the first that died and will be just as important as the last to die in this war against terrorism and to ensure freedom for a people who have not known freedom in over two generations.”

He complained that the true milestones of the war were “rarely covered or discussed,” and said they included the troops who had volunteered to serve, the families of those that have been deployed for a year or more and the Iraqis who have sought at great risk to restore normalcy to their country.

“Celebrate the daily milestones, the accomplishments they have secured and look to the future of a free and democratic Iraq and to the day that all of our troops return home to the heroes welcome they deserve,” Boylan wrote.

Cindy Sheehan to ‘die symbolically’

Outside the White House on Tuesday, peace activist Cindy Sheehan — whose 24-year old son, Casey, died in Iraq last year — said she and others plan to “die symbolically” each night over the next four days to protest U.S. involvement in Iraq.

“I’ll be laying down and not getting up,” said Sheehan, who planned the protests this week expecting that the U.S. military death toll would hit 2,000. “When they let me out I’ll do the same thing if I get arrested.”

A candlelight vigil was planned for the sidewalk outside the White House, the site of a noisy demonstration and numerous arrests in September, which included Sheehan.

Over 300 other protests were planned for Wednesday. War opponents plan to gather at war memorials, federal buildings and in front of landmarks such as Rockefeller Plaza and a recruiting station in Times Square in New York.

Vigils were also expected in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In Houston, a weeklong observance to honor those killed in Iraq, including U.S. military and Iraqi casualties, was to begin Oct. 29 at the memorial to World War II in that city.

Peace activists in Oklahoma City scheduled a candlelight vigil in Memorial Park.

Asking for war funds to be cut off

American Friends Service Committee, which helped coordinate some of these events, urged Congress to halt funding for the Iraqi war.

“As parents, citizens and compassionate people, we have to demand that the funding of this exhausted war stops now, before one more death occurs or one more dollar is spent,” Lila Lipscomb, whose son Sgt. Michael Pederson was killed in Iraq in 2003, said in a statement announcing the campaign.

Lipscomb was set to speak at an antiwar event in Lansing, Mich., on Wednesday.

In his speech, Bush said, “We’ve lost some of our nation’s finest men and women in the war on terror. A time of war is a time for sacrifice.”

But he said that pulling out of the mission is not an option.

“The best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission and lay the foundation of peace by spreading freedom,” he said.

Violence prevails in Iraq

Meanwhile, a suicide car bomb exploded near a regional government ministry in a predominantly Kurdish province of Sulaimaniyah on Tuesday, killing at least nine and wounding four, a security official said.

In Baghdad, Iraqi and U.S. forces refortified a hotel complex housing foreign journalists after three suicide car bombs exploded Monday, killing as many as 20 Iraqis and wounding about 40.

A statement posted on an Islamic Web site Tuesday attributed both attacks to Al-Qaida in Iraq.

Tuesday's blast killed six peshmerga and three civilians and wounded two peshmerga and two civilians, said Lt. Col. Taha Redha, a peshmerga official.

It was one of two suicide attacks by insurgents on Tuesday in the generally peaceful province 160 miles northeast of Baghdad.

About 45 minutes earlier, a suicide car bomber rammed his vehicle into a seven-car convoy carrying Mullah Bakhtiyar, a senior Kurdish official in President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, said police Col. Najim Al-Din Qader. The blast in Sulaimaniya city wounded two of the convoy’s guards and damaged two of its cars, Qader said.

7-year-old killed
Also Tuesday, a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. military convoy in Baghdad, missing the soldiers but killing a 7-year-old boy who was selling cans of black-market gasoline on a street. Nine others were wounded, officials said.

In seven other attacks in the capital, insurgents used two bombs and five shootings to kill a policemen and wound 25 Iraqis, most of them police officers, officials said.

Another policewoman died in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, when militants shot her, police said.

The roadside bomb that killed the 7-year-old in Baghdad exploded in Askan, a commercial district, hitting pedestrians and destroying several parked cars, said police Capt. Qassim Hussein and Dr. Mohammed Jawad at Yarmouk Hospital. The nine wounded civilians included a 10-year-old Iraqi girl, they said.

Iraqi death toll estimates

The Iraqi death toll is unknown, but estimates range much higher than the nearly 2,000 Americans killed.

Iraq Body Count, a British research group that compiles its figures from reports by the major news agencies and British and U.S. newspapers, has said that as many as 30,051 Iraqis have been killed since the start of the war. Other estimates range as high as 100,000.

U.S. and coalition authorities say they have not kept a count of such deaths, and Iraqi government accounting has proven to be haphazard.