Iraqi bombers hit Mosul

Three suicide bomb attacks around the northern city of Mosul killed more than two dozen people yesterday, many of them from the Iraqi security forces, as insurgents kept up pressure on the US-backed government.

In the space of a few hours a suicide car bomber wrecked a police headquarters, an attack on an Iraqi army base killed at least 15 people and four police were killed when a bomber walked into Mosul's General Hospital and blew himself up.

The third attack, on a police post inside the hospital, damaged the emergency ward where casualties had been brought from the previous incidents. Six policemen and nine civilians were wounded, police told a Reuters reporter at the scene.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the assault on the hospital but the earlier two bombings were claimed by al Qaeda's Iraq wing, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The car bomber drove at a district police headquarters at Bab al-Toob in the city centre, striking a rear wall to bring down a section of the old, two-storey building and devastate surrounding market stalls as people started the working day.

Five police and a civilian were killed and 14 people were wounded, hospital staff said. A US military spokesman, Captain Mark Walter, said he had a report of 13 police and two civilians killed but these figures were being checked.

The Defence Ministry said a suicide bomber killed 15 people and wounded 15, mostly civilians, at an army post at Kasak, near Mosul. Mr Walter put the death toll at 16. Soldiers turned the bomber away from the base and he walked instead among a crowd of civilians, the Defence Ministry said in a statement.

Medical staff in Mosul said most of the casualties were building workers from the base. Kasak is near the violent town of Tal Afar, where locals reported heavy fighting on Saturday.

US troops have been fighting in Tal Afar for weeks. They say foreign fighters come into the city from nearby Syria.

Iraqi police and troops have become prime targets for the rebels. The deputy head of one of Baghdad's main police departments, Colonel Riyad Abdelkarim, was assassinated on his way to work yesterday, police in the capital said. Al Qaeda also claimed that attack in an Internet statement.

In the former rebel bastion of Falluja, where six US troops were killed by a suicide car bomber on Thursday, a rocket attack on an Iraqi army patrol caused several casualties, witnesses said. No other details were available.

A US soldier was killed and two were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded in Baghdad yesterday, the military said.

On Saturday, 20 or so insurgents stormed a police post in the western city of Ramadi, killing eight officers, in the latest of a number of massed infantry-style attacks.

More than 100 rebels, employing tactics familiar to regular troops, besieged a Baghdad police station for hours last week.

Military experts say such armed units, led by Sunni Arab officers in Saddam Hussein's old army, are no match for US firepower but could pose a major threat to Shi'ite and Kurdish government troops once Washington withdraws its forces.

US President George W. Bush told Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari in Washington on Friday there would be no timetable for withdrawal, despite pressure from opposition Democrats in the United States, who accuse the president of leading US troops into a "quagmire" in Iraq.

Responding to a report in a British newspaper, quoting unnamed Iraqi sources, that US officials this month met purported insurgents, US and Iraqi officials repeated that there are continual consultations with tribal leaders, clerics and others who profess to represent elements of the insurgency.