Iraq insurgents kill 15, including British soldiers

Guerillas killed at least 15 people in Iraq yesterday, including three British soldiers, a day after spectacular suicide bombings struck across Baghdad.

In the latest attack, gunmen killed two policemen and wounded three on the highway between Hilla and Mahaweel, south of Baghdad, a police source said.

A suicide bomber in a car hit the Doura district in south Baghdad, killing three civilians and two policemen, a police source said.

Violence also erupted near the northern city of Mosul. A suicide bomber strapped with explosives attacked a police station, killing four policemen, police said.

Ten militants blew themselves up across Baghdad on Friday and another attacked Iskindiriya, south of the capital, killing at least 32 people, police said.

The death tolls over the past two days have not been heavy by Baghdad standards but the large number of suicide bombings suggests Iraqi forces have a long way to go before stamping out its biggest security nightmare.

The violence prompted Iraqi police to tighten their grip on Baghdad but insurgents struck again in southeast Iraq, killing three British soldiers with a roadside bomb.

Tense officers manned extra police checkpoints throughout the capital, Reuters journalists and drivers reported, after a series of blasts Al-Qaeda described as an offensive to seize control of the city.

Suicide bombers have consistently undermined government promises that January elections would pacify the country, where violence has raised fears Iraq could slide towards civil war.

Militants, driving cars and blending in with the population, can strike without detection by security forces, who themselves have lost hundreds of comrades in the attacks.

Al-Qaeda's Iraq wing, led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, boasted that the attacks had given it control of the capital, but there was no sign of militants in the streets.

"Through the day and night, Baghdad rang with the music of the mujahideen's bullets and the prayers of the martyrs," it said in an Internet statement.

"Our mujahideen now control the streets," it said. "Our sheikh Abu Musab has urged us to intensify our attacks until America is defeated... and we will continue in our jihad."

In Amara in southeast Iraq, three British soldiers died in what the Ministry of Defence in London said was a suspected roadside bomb. It said the deaths brought to 92 the number of British soldiers who have died in Iraq, including 53 killed in action.

Friday's suicide car bombs followed a thwarted triple suicide attack at a gate to Baghdad's fortified Green Zone government compound on Thursday. A suicide car bomb on Wednesday near a US patrol killed 27 people, mostly Iraqi children.

Suicide bombs, orchestrated by groups of mainly foreigners like Zarqawi's, have increased sharply since the Shi'ite- and Kurdish-led government took power in April.

US generals have said the situation is improving. But Friday's 10 bombs in a day in Baghdad compares with just six countrywide for the entire previous week, a figure a US spokesman had said was the lowest in 11 weeks.

In Samarra, in the central Sunni heartland, locals reported that US troops and Iraqi police had imposed a curfew, ordering residents to stay in their homes after two civilians were killed by gunmen outside a US base.

On the diplomatic front, Iraqi's Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari was due to arrive in Iran for the first visit in decades by a leader of Iraq to its Shi'ite neighbour and former foe.

Jaafari's trip is seen as a historic opportunity to mend ties with a country that Iraq fought for eight years under Saddam. But too quick a rapprochement risks alienating both the United States and Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who are suspicious of Jaafari's Shi'ite-led government's ties to Shi'ite Iran.