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Fate of missing US troops uncertain

US forces on Friday arrested three Iraqis in connection with the possible abduction of two US soldiers north of Baghdad, a military spokesman said.

Sergeant Patrick Compton, a US military spokesman in Baghdad, said the three suspects were being interrogated Friday morning. No other information on the arrests was immediately available.

US officials said Thursday that two American soldiers were apparently abducted.

The men and their Humvee were stationed at a guard post at a rocket demolition site near the town of Balad, north of Baghdad, when they were noticed missing Wednesday night, Compton said.

Ground and aerial searches in the area have been unable to locate the vehicle, Compton added, adding that it was possible the soldiers are no longer alive.

"We don't know if they were abducted or they were just killed," he said.

A search by Apache attack helicopters began immediately after the soldiers failed to respond to a radio check, officials said.

American troops and helicopters scoured the area Thursday for two US soldiers. Ambushes and hostile fire elsewhere in Iraq killed at least one US soldier and two Iraqi civilians and wounded eight other Americans.

Just northwest of Baghdad, a US Army truck apparently hit an explosive device Friday morning, with a US soldier and an eyewitness saying wounded Americans were evacuated by helicopter.

A day after a US Marine was killed responding to an ambush on Americans, reports of attacks on US troops appeared almost hourly -- too frequent for military press officers to keep up with. Most of the information came from witnesses at the scenes of the attacks.

Between Wednesday and Thursday, assailants blew up a US military vehicle with a roadside bomb, dropped grenades from an overpass, destroyed a civilian SUV traveling with US troops, demolished an oil pipeline and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a US Army truck.

Officials played down the violence, but with shattered glass, blood stains and mangled vehicles littering the landscape, the upsurge in attacks is causing concern that the US-led occupation of Iraq could be turning into a guerrilla war.

In the latest and most serious reported attacks:

-- A member of a US special operations force was killed and eight were wounded Thursday morning by hostile fire southwest of Baghdad, a Central Command statement said.

The same day, soldiers who were also southwest of Baghdad reported that an explosion killed an American soldier.

-- In another ambush, assailants threw grenades at a US and Iraqi civilian convoy in west Baghdad, killing two Iraqi employees of the national electricity authority, US soldiers and Iraqi police said.

A military spokesman, Major William Thurmond, said the spate of ambushes could be a response to recent US raids on Baath party strongholds.

"There have been more attacks recently, but it's probably premature to say this is part of a pattern," Thurmond said. "We've kicked open the nests of some of these bad guys."

An Iraqi police official, Brig. Ahmed Khazem, called the ambushes "isolated actions ... carried out by individual mercenaries."

The Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera, however, aired statements Thursday from two previously unknown groups urging assaults on US-led forces in Iraq.
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