In Khaldiyah, about 70 miles west of Baghdad, three US soldiers were killed and six others were wounded when a vehicle, possibly driven by a suicide bomber, exploded at a US checkpoint near a bridge across the Euphrates River, the US command said.
Iraqi witnesses said a four-wheel-drive vehicle drove up to the checkpoint and exploded in front of a US Army Humvee trying to block it. At least eight Iraqis were injured, said Dr. Ahmed Nasrat Jabouri of the provincial hospital in nearby Ramadi.
Earlier yesterday, two US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb that struck their four-vehicle convoy north of Fallujah, a town near Khaldiyah in a center of anti-American resistance.
The latest deaths brought to 512 the number of US service members who have died since the Iraq war began March 20. Most of the deaths have occurred since President Bush declared an end to active combat May 1.
A third attack took place when a truck bomb exploded yesterday morning near government buildings in Samarra, about 70 miles north of Baghdad, barely missing a US military police patrol as it entered a police station compound.
The blast killed four Iraqi civilians and wounded about 40 people, including seven US soldiers who were cut by flying glass inside one of the buildings, Captain Jennifer Knight of the 720th Military Police Battalion said. The soldiers' wounds were not life-threatening.
The explosion set fire to a half-dozen cars parked near the buildings, which included a police station and municipal offices, and created a large crater in the street. The burned-out hulks of the cars, some reduced to mounds of twisted metal, smoldered in the damp, chilly air hours after the blast.
Resistance to the US-led occupation has persisted in the Sunni Muslim heartland north and west of Baghdad, despite the Dec. 13 capture of Hussein.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, at least one sniper firing from a building wounded a US soldier on patrol in the upscale Mansour neighborhood west of the Tigris River, Major Kevin West said.
