Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News

BAGHDAD, 3 May 2004 — Six US troops were killed and about 30 were wounded in a mortar attack yesterday near Ramadi in western Iraq, the US military said.

A military spokeswoman gave no further details and did not say whether the victims were Marines or army soldiers. However, most of the Americans stationed in the Ramadi area are Marines.

Ramadi is about 100 kilometers west of Baghdad in Anbar province, which also includes Fallujah.

Earlier, five soldiers were killed in separate attacks.

One US soldier was killed yesterday and 10 were wounded in a bomb and small arms attack on a coalition base near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, the military said.

Overnight, Shiite militiamen attacked a US convoy with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades near the southern city of Ammara, 300 kilometers south of Baghdad.

Two soldiers were killed, the military said. Through the night and into yesterday morning, Iraqis set fire to the long line of abandoned vehicles, jumping on the hoods and beating them with sticks.

An attack in northwest Baghdad killed two other soldiers and wounded two Iraqi security officers and another American, the military said.

The deaths raised the US death toll to 151 since a wave of violence began on April 1. At least 753 US troops have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

Meanwhile, kidnapped US truck driver Thomas Hamill escaped his Iraqi captors yesterday, prying open a door of the house where he was held and running to an American patrol passing by, officials and his wife said.

Running a kilometer to the patrol, Hamill identified himself and led the soldiers to the house, where two Iraqis with an automatic weapon were arrested, a military spokesman said.

The 43-year-old native of Macon, Mississippi, escaped more than three weeks after he was abducted by gunmen who blasted the convoy he was driving in on the outskirts of Baghdad. An American soldier was abducted in the same attack — and remains missing — and at least four of Hamill’s co-workers from a subsidiary of Halliburton were killed.