Two people were killed in mortar attacks on Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone on Wednesday, the second serious attack in two days, as a search for three US soldiers held by al Qaeda south of the capital intensified.
Violence raged across Iraq, with police confirming on Wednesday that 45 people had been killed the previous day by a chlorine gas truck bomb in Diyala, one of the most volatile areas since a security crackdown began three months ago.
The truck laden with canisters of the deadly gas was detonated in a market area in Abu Sayda, a mostly Shia town north of Baghdad, police said. A US embassy spokesman said two Iraqis were killed and 10 other people wounded when up to 10 mortar rounds landed inside the sprawling complex of Saddam-era monuments and palaces.
None of the dead or injured were embassy employees or contractors, the spokesman said. Mortar rounds or rockets are often fired at the Green Zone, but insurgents appear to have stepped up their attacks recently. South of Baghdad, thousands of US and Iraqi troops continued combing farmland for three US soldiers missing since an ambush near Mahmudiya on Saturday.
Further south, clashes between militias loyal to firebrand anti-American Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi government forces killed at least eight people and wounded 40 more in Nasiriya. Three Iraqi soldiers were among the dead. In the northern city of Mosul, police said up 200 insurgents attacked an Iraqi police station and a prison and set off a string of bombs.
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