Three suicide bomb attacks killed more than two dozen people yesterday, many of them from the Iraqi security forces, in the northern city of Mosul as insurgents kept up pressure on the US-backed government.
Within hours a suicide car bomber wrecked a police headquarters, an attack on an Iraqi army base killed up to 16 people and four police were killed when a bomber walked into Mosul's General Hospital and blew himself up.
The third attack, on a police post in the hospital, caused damage to the emergency ward where casualties had been brought from the previous incidents. Six policemen and nine civilians were wounded, police told a reporter at the scene.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the assault on the hospital but the earlier two bombings were claimed by al-Qaeda's Iraq wing, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The car bomber drove at a district police headquarters at Bab al-Toob in the city center, striking a rear wall to bring down a section of the old, two-story building and devastate surrounding market stalls as people started the working day.
Five police and a civilian were killed and 14 people were wounded, hospital staff said.
A US military spokesman said up to 16 people were killed and seven wounded in a suicide attack on an army post at Kasak, between Mosul and the violent city of Tal Afar, to the west, where residents reported fighting on Saturday.
Medical staff in Mosul said they had received five dead and 13 wounded from the Kasak base, many of them building workers.
Iraqi military officials said two suicide bombers appeared to have attacked the base but details were sketchy.
US troops have been fighting in Tal Afar for weeks. They say foreign fighters come in there from nearby Syria.
A US soldier was killed and two wounded when a roadside bomb exploded in Baghdad on Sunday, the military said.
On Saturday, 20 or so insurgents stormed a police post in the western city of Ramadi, killing eight officers, in the latest of a number of massed infantry-style attacks.
More than 100 rebels, employing tactics familiar to regular troops, besieged a Baghdad police station for hours last week.
Responding to a report in a British newspaper, quoting unnamed Iraqi sources, that US officials this month met purported insurgents, US and Iraqi officials repeated that there are continual consultations with tribal leaders, clerics and others who profess to represent the insurgency.
Meanwhile, Australian Douglas Wood, freed after being held by Iraqi insurgents for 47 days, told yesterday how he managed to keep his spirits up after two fellow hostages were slain within earshot.
Wood told of two Iraqi hostages being executed -- one at his feet -- during his incarceration in a house in Baghdad.
"Over a period of about five days three Iraqis turned up, the first of which was the only one that got out alive," he told the Ten network. "He came out with me and the other two were shot while I was there."
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