A US soldier was killed by a makeshift bomb in Baghdad on Wednesday, hours before rocket-propelled grenade attacks shattered the dawn of Christmas Day in the Iraqi capital, wounding a woman sleeping in her apartment and smashing windows at the neighboring Ishtar Sheraton Hotel.
On Wednesday, a roadside bomb exploded north of Baghdad, killing three US soldiers in the deadliest attack on US forces since Saddam Hussein's capture. A soldier from the Army's 1st Armored Division was also killed in Baghdad on Wednesday when a bomb exploded during a raid in a north-central neighborhood, the military said.
No one was injured in Thursday's attack on the Sheraton, which is filled with Western contractors and journalists. Gunfire erupted in the streets moments after the attack; bystanders said a security guard fired at men in a pickup truck who had launched the grenades.
Late Wednesday, a mortar shell crashed into an upper floor of the hotel.
Minutes before yesterday's Sheraton attack, attackers fired five grenade rounds, apparently intended for the nearby Baghdad Hotel, but all exploded harmlessly, said Army Lieutenant Kurt Muniz. Someone also fired a pair of grenades at the gate of a 1st Armored Division base in east Baghdad. No one was injured in those attacks, Muniz said.
A 1st Armored infantry company fanning out through the streets behind the Sheraton found leaflets warning Iraqis to stay home during the coming rebel offensive, Muniz said. The leaflets also warned US forces to leave the country and Iraqi police to stop working with foreign occupiers, Muniz said.
"I guess they think security's going to be downgraded because of the holiday," said Muniz, 26, of Queens, New York.
"If they want to bring it, I say bring it on," he said.
A crowd gathered in the hall outside the apartment hit by a grenade apparently meant for the Sheraton. Two young girls, shaken by the blast that injured their mother, peeked out the door. One man blamed the Americans for the lack of security.
"Iraq is not Palestine," the man said, giving his name only as Abdullah.
"Americans are the problem," he said.
Wednesday night's attack on the hotel injured no one because the 60mm direct-lay mortar shell hit a barrier on the heavily barricaded 19-story hotel, which rises from the east bank of the Tigris River, said Captain Jason Beck of the US Army's 1st Armored Division.
Beck said that Iraqi security guarding the hotel immediately fired at the guerrillas, who fled. Early yesterday, distant explosions were heard in central Baghdad as the US military bombarded suspected rebel positions.
The hotel attacks followed a string of separate bombings that killed six civilians and a suicide bomber in addition to the three US soldiers. Early yesterday, the US military announced that a fourth US soldier was killed a day earlier by a bomb in north-central Baghdad.
Until Wednesday, US military commanders had said the number of daily rebel attacks were slowing in recent weeks -- even as they braced for increased violence around the Christmas holiday.
The day's fighting began before dawn, when the 1st Armored Division unleashed an artillery barrage on three rebel targets in southwest Baghdad, aided by Air Force jet fighters and gunships.
Elsewhere, US troops continued their stepped-up raids on homes in several towns that led to the arrest of a Sunni sheik said to be close to the most wanted man in Iraq.
Troops rounded up dozens of guerrilla suspects in strongholds of US resistance, saying they were capitalizing on intelligence from interrogations and documents seized in the Dec. 13 capture of Hussein, the former Iraqi president.
At 9am on Wednesday, three US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb that hit a military convoy near Samarra, a town north of Baghdad where insurgents have often launched attacks.
In northern Iraq, a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-packed car in front of the Kurdish Interior Ministry in the city of Irbil, near Kirkuk, US Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said in Baghdad.
Four people were killed -- two guards, a 13-year-old girl and a passing taxi driver -- along with the bomber, said Interior Minister Karim Sinjar. He said 101 people were injured in the 11am explosion, two seriously.
Kimmitt said the blast brought down the protective wall in front of the building.
Irbil houses the Kurdish parliament. Under US-led aerial protection, Iraqi Kurds, ethnically distinct from the majority Arabs, have ruled a Switzerland-sized swath of northern Iraq since the end of the Gulf War more than a decade ago.
Also on Wednesday, two people were killed and two injured -- all minibus passengers -- when a roadside bomb detonated in a Baghdad traffic tunnel, hospital officials said. The bomb exploded in the traffic-packed Shurta tunnel around noon.
Detonating improvised roadside bombs has become the favored rebel tactic in recent months.
The cleverly concealed bombs have killed numerous American troops.
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