Car bomb hits US Iraq base

A car bomb exploded outside a US military base in Iraq yesterday, wounding some soldiers, as American troops uncovered a weapons cache north of Baghdad with enough ammunition to launch a spate of attacks.

A US army spokeswoman said the car bomb attack occurred at an 82nd Airborne Division base near the flashpoint town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad. She said three Iraqis believed to be in the vehicle were killed in the apparent suicide attack.

"The 82nd Airborne did sustain casualties," the spokeswoman said, adding that their condition was unclear.

A suicide car bomb attack on a military base in Iraq's north on Tuesday wounded nearly 60 US soldiers. A suicide bomber also blew himself up near a separate base on Tuesday.

Since the start of the war to oust Saddam Hussein, 310 US soldiers have been killed in action, 195 of them in guerilla attacks since major combat was declared over on May 1.

Attacks on troops, contractors and diplomats from countries backing the United States in Iraq have added to domestic public pressure in many nations to pull out of the mission.

In a blow to US efforts to transfer more of the burden to stabilising the country to Iraqis, an official with the US-led administration said hundreds of recruits to the new Iraqi army's only battalion had quit, complaining of bad pay and conditions.

Iraq's US governor Paul Bremer abolished the 400,000 strong-Iraqi army in May.

"There are about 300 individuals out of a total of about 700 in the First Battalion of the Iraqi army who have effectively resigned," the official told reporters.

US troops earlier yesterday seized three Iraqi men suspected of heading guerilla cells in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit and said they had uncovered a large weapons cache.

In the garden of one of two houses raided in Tikrit, 175 kilometres north of Baghdad, soldiers dug up a hoard of rifles, grenades and explosives that they said were used by members of Saddam's Fedayeen militia to mount attacks.

In the town of Lutafiya, south of Baghdad, US soldiers staged 18 raids on Wednesday, arresting 41 people in connection with the killing of seven Spanish intelligence officers in an attack on their convoy last month.

In violence elsewhere, two journalists with Time magazine were wounded, one seriously, when a hand grenade was thrown at US forces they were accompanying on a patrol in Baghdad late on Wednesday, a US military official said.

He declined to name the journalists. The official also said a US Apache helicopter which came down south of the northern city of Mosul on Wednesday was not hit by ground fire. Its crew of two escaped without major injuries, but there has been some confusion over why the Apache was forced to make a controlled landing.