Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News Staff

BAGHDAD, 25 January 2004 — In a fresh surge of violence, Iraqi guerrillas yesterday killed five US soldiers and four Iraqis. In the volatile “Sunni Triangle”, the US soldiers were killed in separate bombings west of Baghdad. An American convoy narrowly missed a truck bomb attack that killed four Iraqis and wounded about 40 other people north of the capital.

The bloody attacks occurred as UN security experts began to study the possible return of UN international staff to play a key role in Iraq’s transformation to democracy.

In Khaldiyah, 110 km (70 miles) west of Baghdad, three US soldiers were killed and six 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 4-wheel drive vehicle drove up to the checkpoint and blew up in front of a US Army Humvee that tried to block it. At least eight Iraqis — six of them women — were injured, according to Dr. Ahmed Nasrat Jabouri of the provincial hospital in nearby Ramadi.

“It shook the whole area,” Emad Ghareb Hamid said of the blast. US troops sealed off the area while ambulances and helicopters evacuated the casualties.

Earlier, two US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb that struck their four-vehicle convoy north of Fallujah, a city near Khaldiyah.

The latest deaths brought to 512 the number of American service members who have died since the United States and its allies launched the Iraq war March 20. Most of the deaths occurred since President George W. Bush declared an end to active combat May 1.

The third attack took place when a truck bomb exploded in the morning near a government building in Samarra, 110 km (70 miles) north of Baghdad, barely missing a US military police patrol as it turned into a police station compound.

The blast killed four Iraqi civilians and wounded about 40 people including seven American soldiers who were cut by flying glass inside one of the buildings, Capt. Jennifer Knight of the 720th Military Police Battalion said.

The explosion set fire to a half dozen cars parked near the buildings, which included a police station and municipal offices, and gouged 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.

In Baghdad, a sniper firing from a building shot and wounded an American soldier who was on foot patrol in the upscale Mansour neighborhood west of the Tigris, Maj. Kevin West said. A bridge across the Tigris leading to the coalition headquarters was closed by US troops for two hours.

In the northern city of Mosul, an Iraqi police officer was killed and another wounded when their patrol pick-up truck came under attack. “Gunmen fired from a car at police driving in a pick-up truck in the Al-Wahda district at 11:30 a.m.,” police Lt. Col. Abdul Azel Hazem said.

The incidents underscored the precarious security situation throughout much of Iraq as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan weighs a US and Iraqi request to play a greater role in the political transformation of the country. A two-member UN security team arrived Friday in Baghdad to study the possible return of international staffers.

— Additional input from agencies