Naseer Al-Nahr, Arab News Staff

BAGHDAD, 25 December 2003 — A huge explosion rocked central Baghdad last night, and the US military said it was a rebel rocket-propelled grenade that narrowly missed the Sheraton Ishtar Hotel.

The failed attack, on Christmas Eve, followed a string of separate bombings that killed at least six Iraqis and three American soldiers as violence continued unabated.

“We can confirm that an RPG was fired at the Sheraton but missed,” said Capt. Jason Beck of the US Army’s 1st Armored Division, the unit that controls Baghdad.

It was the 1st Division that unleashed a massive artillery barrage further from central Baghdad before dawn yesterday, backed by air force jetfighters and gunships that swooped out of the sky to fire on targets that the military said were anti-American insurgents.

Overnight, troops continued to raid homes and arrested a Sunni sheikh said to be close to the most wanted man in Iraq.

At 9 a.m. yesterday, three US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb as they traveled in a convoy near Samarra, a town north of Baghdad where guerrillas have often launched attacks.

US military commanders say the number of daily rebel attacks had slowed in recent weeks, even before the Dec. 13 capture of Saddam Hussein. American troops have capitalized on intelligence gleaned from the former dictator’s arrest, rounding up dozens of guerrilla suspects in raids on strongholds of anti-US resistance.

Meanwhile, a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-packed car in front of the Kurdish Interior Ministry in the northern Iraq city of Arbil, near Kirkuk, US Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said in Baghdad.

Five bodies were transferred from the blast site to Arbil Emergency Hospital, officials said. Some 101 people were injured in the 11 a.m. explosion, two seriously, according to Interior Minister Karim Sinjar.

He said the suicide bomber and four civilians were killed — two guards, a 13-year-old girl and a passing taxi driver. Kimmit said the blast brought down the protective wall in front of the building.

Arbil houses the Kurdish Parliament. Under US-led aerial protection, Iraqi Kurds, ethnically distinct from the majority Arabs, have ruled an autonomous Switzerland-sized stretch of northern Iraq since the end of the Gulf War more than a decade ago.

After the explosion that killed the American soldiers near Samarra, US forces saw a person driving away and began searching for the vehicle, Kimmitt said.

American troops have suffered numerous casualties in roadside bomb blasts; rebels whose firepower doesn’t match up to superior US weaponry in head-on confrontations have developed cunning ways of concealing the explosives along roadsides.

But Kimmitt said troops were discovering roadside bombs more often, sometimes because of tips from Iraqi civilians. “The number of effective (roadside bombs) as a percentage of the total has gone down,” he said.

Kimmitt also said two Iraqi police were killed in an attack in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, and that two suspects assailants were detained.

Yesterday, a minibus detonated a roadside bomb in a Baghdad traffic tunnel, killing two people and two others were injured, hospital officials said. The bomb exploded in the Shurta tunnel around noon, when roads fill as residents go home for lunch.

Earlier yesterday, Baghdad residents said explosions from the overnight US bombardment were heard until about 2 a.m.

— Additional input from agencies