A roadside bomb killed a local police chief and another officer in Baghdad yesterday, hospital and police officials said, in the latest insurgent attack on Iraq's battered police forces.
In other violence, two US soldiers were killed and two others wounded by a roadside bomb late Monday in Iraq's capital, while a US Marine died in action yesterday west of Baghdad, the military said.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Television news footage from western Baghdad's al-Washash district showed a destroyed white Iraqi police pickup truck, its doors smashed and blood splattered across the driver's seat.
Police, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified one of the dead Iraqi officers as Colonel Mouyad Mohammed Bashar, who was chief of al-Mamoun police station.
A third officer was wounded in the blast, said Zayed Mohammed, a doctor at al-Yarmouk hospital. At the hospital, a bloodied policeman lay on a bed, bandages wrapped around his stomach and leg.
In the northern city of Mosul, attackers opened fire on a police station, killing one officer and injuring two others before fleeing, police chief Izzat Ibrahim said.
Police in Iraq have repeatedly been targeted by insurgents pressing a campaign to destabilize the interim government. The guerrillas see police as collaborators with US coalition forces.
From April last year until May, 710 Iraqi police were killed out of a total force of 130,000 officers, authorities said. A truck bomb last Wednesday targeted a police recruiting center in Baqouba, 60km northeast of Baghdad, where hundreds of job applicants were gathered. It killed 70 people.
Early yesterday, militants shot at the offices of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party in Hawija, about 241km north of Baghdad. The overnight attack caused slight damage to the building, but no casualties, police said.
In the holy city of Najaf, US forces on Monday fought with gunmen protecting radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's house in clashes that killed one woman and wounded three people. The US military had no immediate comment.
At least six US military vehicles entered the Zahra area in Najaf near al-Sadr's house, which is protected by his militia, the Mahdi Army, witnesses said.
Barrages of gunfire and mortar rounds set cars on fire before Iraqi police intervened and the US forces withdrew, witnesses said.
"One woman was killed and we have three injured," said Ajwak Kadhim, director at Al-Hakim Hospital in Najaf, 160km south of Baghdad.
Ali al-Yassiry, a Baghdad spokesman for al-Sadr, said US troops briefly surrounded al-Sadr's house in Najaf but then withdrew from the city. He said the fighting ended and the Mahdi Army was patrolling the area.
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