IRAQ: Resistance fighters wounded eight US soldiers in three attacks in Iraq yesterday, a day after President Bush said there were enough troops in Iraq to deal with the guerrillas.
Two Iraqis were killed and 12 wounded as a result of the increasingly bold attacks on US forces.
At least 23 US troops have died from hostile fire in Iraq since Mr Bush declared major combat over on May 1st.
US officials blame former intelligence officers and Iraqi army elements loyal to Saddam Hussein.
The hit-and-run attacks, which typically involve grenades launched on US convoys, have grown more frequent in recent weeks, but Mr Bush said the 150,000 troops in Iraq were adequately prepared.
"There are some who feel like conditions are such that they can attack us there," Mr Bush told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. "My answer is: Bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation...We're not going to get nervous."
Democrats in Washington criticised Mr Bush for issuing what they called an invitation to fire on US troops.
Hours after Mr Bush spoke, assailants in broad daylight in central Baghdad wounded at least one US soldier when they fired a rocket-propelled grenade on a US vehicle. One Iraqi passer-by was killed and 11 others wounded.
That followed a pre-dawn firefight in north-western Baghdad in which an Iraqi man shot at a US patrol, wounding one soldier. The soldiers returned fire, killing the gunman and wounding a six-year-old boy.
In the attack with the highest number of US casualties, six soldiers were wounded when an explosion hit their convoy of two Humvees in the town of Ramadi, some 60 miles west of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, a senior US military intelligence officer in Falluja said yesterday he could not confirm an earlier US claim that a bomb-making class caused a deadly blast at a town mosque.
"That was never confirmed. We can't confirm or deny this," Major Joffery Watson said of the US Central Command statement issued yesterday.
"Based on the indications we have right now, I don't think there is any way whatsoever to say that that was going on."
Residents of the town full of anti-American sentiment over earlier clashes said nine people, including an imam or prayer leader, were killed when a blast destroyed a building next to the town's Hassan mosque on Monday night.
They blamed the explosion on a US air raid, which the American military denied.
Lieut Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the top military commander in Iraq, told a news conference that a US forensic team was due to arrive in Falluja, 36 miles west of Baghdad, to investigate the blast at the mosque.