Attack on US base in Iraq kills 24

A mortar attack on a tented dining hall at a US military base killed 24 people and wounded more than 60 in the Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday in one of the deadliest attacks on US forces since they invaded.

Among the dead were 14 US soldiers and seven employees of US contracting firm KBR.

The attack came as US war ally Tony Blair made a surprise visit to Baghdad and French officials confirmed that two journalists seized by militants on August 20 had been released.

The British Prime Minister vowed the war on insurgents would be won and elections would go ahead on January 30. As he left, mortars fell on Baghdad's Green Zone compound, as they do almost daily. There appeared to be no casualties.

The Mosul strike came at noon (0900 GMT) when many soldiers at Forward Operating Base Marez, a huge camp built around the northern city's airfield, would have been eating lunch. The tented dining hall can seat hundreds of soldiers at a time, Reuters correspondents who have stayed at the base said.

Major General Carter Ham, the commander of the 8,000 US troops based in Mosul, said the dead included US soldiers, US and foreign contractors and members of the Iraqi army.

"More than 20 have been killed and more than 60 people have been wounded," he said, adding there was a single explosion.

Mosul has seen a surge in violence over the past six weeks, since US forces launched an offensive against insurgents holed up in Falluja, an assault designed to break the back of the guerrilla movement before next month's election.

In the bloodiest previous single incident for US troops in Iraq, two Black Hawk helicopters crashed in Mosul in November last year, killing 17 soldiers. At the start of the war in March last year, 29 soldiers were killed in a fierce day of fighting.

Iraqi militant group Ansar al-Sunna, a known Sunni Muslim faction that has been at the heart of the 18-month insurgency against US forces, claimed responsibility for the bloodshed.

Responding to the assault, the White House vowed that the "enemies of freedom" would be defeated. On Monday, President George W. Bush warned that Iraqi bombers were having an impact.

Mosul had been held up as a model of US-backed stability. But problems resurfaced in mid-November when groups of militants overran more than a dozen police stations in the city, Iraq's third largest, looting them of weapons and then destroying them.

US military commanders have said Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is allied to al Qaeda, probably fled Falluja ahead of the US offensive there and may have shifted his base of operations to Mosul.

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin told parliament: "I have the profound joy of announcing that Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot have been freed."

The two men were kidnapped with their Syrian driver Mohammed al-Jundi while on their way to the Iraqi holy city of Najaf.

Mr Blair, who has twice visited calmer southern Iraq but never seen perilous Baghdad, flew to meet Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in the city's Green Zone compound, which houses the Iraqi government and US military. He arrived under tight security.

Hailing Iraq's election workers as "heroes", Mr Blair, expected to call an election next year, launched a passionate defence of the war as vital for Britain's security and Iraqis' freedom.

"Here are people who are risking their lives every day in order to make sure that the people of Iraq get a chance to decide their own destiny," Mr Blair told a news conference after meeting Election Commission chiefs running Iraq's January 30 poll.

Three people working for the Commission were killed by gunmen in Baghdad two days ago.

Mr Blair, who later met British troops in Basra and also goes to Jordan and Israel, was clearly aware of the threats in Iraq's capital, where there are daily shootings and bombings, not least on the Green Zone, a former palace of Saddam Hussein.

"You can feel the sense of danger people live in... I feel a sense of humility," he said, turning to Mr Allawi. "It's a very tough challenge you face. You feel the sense of the challenge."

But Mr Blair said he had no doubt Britain was right to have helped oust Saddam and described the increasingly bloody fight against Iraq's insurgents as a war between right and wrong.

"Whatever people felt about the original conflict, we the British aren't a nation of quitters," he said. "What's very obvious to me is that the Iraqi people here, they're not going to quit on this task either. They're going to see it through."

Both Mr Blair and Mr Allawi were at pains to portray the fight against insurgents in Iraq, most of whom are loyalists to the former regime or Sunni Muslim militants, as part of the US administration's war on terrorism launched after September 11, 2001.

"We stand on the side of the democrats against the terrorists," the British prime minister said.