Two civilians were killed when a suicide bomber on a motorcycle rammed into a US army patrol in Iraq today, police said, while four other people were killed and more than a dozen wounded in other attacks.
There was no immediate information on US military casualties from the suicide bomb near the small town of Muqdadiya, 80km northeast of Baghdad. Five people were wounded in the assault.
US forces have pulled out of Iraqi cities and are working to formally end combat operations by September 1st, cutting the US military force from just under 90,000 to 50,000.
Overall violence has dropped sharply since the worst days of sectarian war in 2006-07, but bombings and shootings are still a regular occurrence, often targeting police, government officials and Sunni ex-insurgents who swapped sides to fight al-Qaeda.
Iraq has seen a spike in violence since an inconclusive March 7th parliamentary election, which has yet to yield a government.
Abdul Rahman Dawood, a politician with the Iraqiya coalition that eked out a two-seat win in the election, was wounded today when a roadside bomb exploded near his car in the Zafaraniya district of southeastern Baghdad, police said. A passenger in the car was also wounded.
In Abu Ghraib on Baghdad's western outskirts, an armed group killed a policeman and his wife in their home, police said. Their five sons were wounded. The same group seriously wounded another policeman living nearby.
In western Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed one civilian and wounded two others, police said.
In northern Iraq, gunmen killed an off-duty policeman on his farm in western Mosul, a restive city 390km north of Baghdad. Another officer was seriously wounded when a grenade was hurled at his patrol in central Mosul.
Also in Mosul, security forces said a 16-year-old al-Qaeda recruit was arrested today minutes before he planned to blow himself up and assassinate a Shia cleric.
Reuters