Rebels fired a rocket at a government building in northern Iraq, killing two civilians and wounding 14 others, an official said. The attack brought to 21 the number of people killed in two days of explosions and shootings across the country.
The rocket launcher was hidden inside a wooden cart that was wheeled up to a bomb-blast wall surrounding the three-story main government building in the northern city of Mosul, police Sergeant Jassim Mohammed said on Saturday.
The rocket struck the top of the wall before falling into the building's courtyard and exploding, he said.
The assailants fled the area after the attack.
The dead and wounded were taken to Mosul General Hospital, Dr. Ragheed Ghanim said.
In the country's south on Saturday, a gunman shot and killed the Iraqi driver of a civilian truck carrying supplies to Japan's military, Japan's Kyodo News agency said. The attack was an apparent robbery attempt, it said.
Japan's Defense Agency said a civilian truck hired to transport supplies to Japanese troops in Samawah was attacked, but had no other details. Tokyo has dispatched about 1,000 naval, air, and ground forces to help with Iraq's reconstruction.
In central Baghdad on Saturday, a bomb exploded on a street as a convoy of sport utility vehicles passed, wounding five Iraqis, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Peter Jones said. It was not clear who was in the cars. US troops sealed off the area after the blast.
Fighting Friday in the city of Fallujah, about 55km west of Baghdad, left one US Marine dead and seven wounded, a US spokesman in Baghdad said. The Marines and guerrillas fought for hours in the alleys of the city, which has resisted American efforts to pacify it since the ouster of Saddam Hussein a year ago.
The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force issued a statement saying it was "conducting offensive operations ... to foster a secure and stable environment for the people." It went on to say that "some have chosen to fight. Having elected their fate, they are being engaged and destroyed."
A freelance cameraman for the US network ABC television, Burhan Mohammed Mazhour, 34, was shot in the head and killed while filming the clashes. It was unclear who killed him.
Four other Iraqis were killed and six wounded in the fighting, said a doctor at Fallujah hospital, Diyaa al-Jumailee. Witnesses said the dead included a shop owner, a customer and two bystanders.
This week, US Marines took over authority in Fallujah and surrounding areas from the US Army. The city on the banks of the Euphrates River is in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where support for Saddam was strong and rebel attacks on American forces are frequent.
Earlier Friday, four members of the US-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, or ICDC, also were killed while raiding a hideout near Saddam's hometown of Tikrit with US soldiers, the American military said. Three suspected rebels also died and 21 were captured in the raid.
In the town of Shwan, near the northern city of Kirkuk, four people en route to a wedding died when the vehicles they were riding in struck an anti-tank mine. The explosion injured 12 other people, police said.
Gunmen shot and killed an Iraqi police officer late Friday while he was walking home in Kirkuk, Fhadila Rashid, an official at the city's morgue, said on Saturday.
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