The US government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.

A roadside bomb targeted a convoy carrying a US security team in the southern Iraqi city of Basra today, killing two American civilians and seriously wounding a third, the US Embassy said in a statement.

AMERICAN and Iraqi troops launched a dawn assault yesterday on another town near the Syrian border and killed 50 insurgents, a US statement said, while the Interior Ministry reported that a car bomb detonated outside a gate leading into the fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad, killing two South Africans.