Rescuers dug seven bodies, all of them from the same family, from the rubble of their house on Saturday after an abortive truck bomb attack on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad in which nine people died. As American troops and Iraq's beleaguered Christian minority marked Christmas, there was no let-up in pressure on US and Iraqi forces from insurgents who bombed an Iraqi National Guard convoy in Mosul and assassinated a Baghdad medical professor.
Turks were gripped by a new hostage drama - television showed a video of a prominent Turkish shipping magnate for whom kidnappers in southern Iraq were demanding $25 million ransom.
A day after a visiting Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told US troops the war could be won, American units in Mosul were again raiding homes in the hunt for suspects in the suicide bombing of a base mess tent that killed 22 people.
US troops were on high alert, four days after the Mosul bomb, the deadliest strike on Americans since they invaded.
"It would be a huge psychological boost for them to brag that they killed us at Christmas," said Colonel Ron Johnson, who commands the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit south of Baghdad.
US Marines said they had captured two leaders of a militant group linked to al-Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the restive city of Ramadi. They said the men were captured on December 8 and December 12 during sweeps of western Anbar province.
EMBASSY ATTACKED: Rescuers dug seven bodies from the rubble of a house in the capital's Mansur district, home to many embassies, 12 hours after a massive fireball lit up the night sky late on Friday.
Police and witnesses said a fuel tanker appeared to have tried to ram its way to the Jordanian embassy but became stuck in a defensive chicane of concrete blocks and then exploded.
The embassy - which replaced a mission destroyed by a suicide bomber last year - was unscathed, but a house across the street collapsed.
"I'm the only one left," wailed a young woman who arrived at the scene in the morning to find her family gone.
Police said two other people had been killed in the blast.
Zarqawi, now Americans' top target in Iraq, claimed responsibility for last year's attack on the embassy of his home country, whose government allied itself with the United States against Saddam after the 1991 Gulf war.
Friday's attack came just hours after Rumsfeld had completed a day of visits around the country to try to bolster morale among 150,000 US troops, who face an increasingly effective enemy bent on disrupting next month's election.
A week ago, twin suicide car bombings in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala killed more than 60 people and wounded nearly 200 in what appeared to be a bid to spark sectarian conflict between the Sunni minority favoured under Saddam and majority Shiites likely to dominate the election.
The regional governor of Najaf, where the bombing killed at least 52 people, said those responsible for that blast had been detained, though he gave no details.
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