Four killed in Iraq violence

Roadside bombs killed two American soldiers in northern Baghdad and ignited a train carrying fuel in the south of Iraq’s capital, killing two Iraqis and wounding six others, officials said today.

The bombing that killed the two US soldiers came yesterday during a patrol by soldiers assigned to the US army’s Task Force Baghdad, the military said today.

Another US soldier was wounded.

Their deaths brought to three the number of American soldiers killed in central Iraq yesterday; seven have been killed since Sunday night.

In the other attack yesterday, a roadside bomb killed an American soldier and wounded five others in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, the US command said.

On Sunday, four American soldiers from Task Force Baghdad were killed when their vehicle ran over a roadside bomb in south-west Baghdad.

As of yesterday, at least 1,782 members of the US military had died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003.

The blast on the train carrying fuel exploded into flames when it was hit by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad, killing two people and wounding six others, police said.

The attack, which sent a massive cloud of smoke over the southern part of the city, occurred in the southern neighbourhood of Dora, an area where insurgents are known to be active, police Lt Thaer Mahmoud said.

The bomb appeared to have targeted a nearby police commando checkpoint, Mahmoud said.

One of those killed and four of the injured are security force members, he said. The rest were civilians.

The violence came a day after Iraq’s most feared terror group said it killed two kidnapped Algerian diplomats because of Algeria’s ties to the US and its crackdown on Islamic extremists.

Algeria opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq, although it has in recent years become a close US ally, particularly in investigating and arresting Islamic extremists. Al Qaida in Iraq, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, linked the killing of the diplomats to the Algerian crackdown.

The Bush administration has been eager to maintain political momentum in Iraq, hoping a broad-based government can lure Sunni Arabs guerrillas away from the insurgency.

A key step in that strategy is a new constitution, which is to be completed by August 15 and presented to the voters in a referendum two months later.

Yesterday, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went to Baghdad to urge the Iraqis to finish the draft charter on time.