Five US troops were killed on Friday in the deadliest attack on American forces in Iraq for more than a year when a suicide truck bomber struck a police compound in the restive city of Mosul. Two Iraqi police and an Iraqi soldier also perished in the blast in the northern city, the countrys second-biggest, which the US military considers the last urban bastion of al Qaeda in Iraq.
The attack comes amid a sudden upturn in bombings nation-wide that have dealt a blow to recent upbeat assessments by American commanders about Iraqs fragile security. A US military spokesman said that five soldiers were killed and two others wounded in the attack, adding that the patrol appeared to have been in the area by chance and was not deliberately targeted.
"According to unit reporting it appears to have been a target of opportunity as the ... convoy was passing the national police station, and not at the headquarters conducting training," spokesman Major Derrick Cheng told AFP. Fridays truck bomb wounded another 65 people, including Iraqi policemen and dozens of civilians living near the compound who were pelted with shrapnel, a medic said.
A policeman who asked not to be named described how the truck barrelled through a checkpoint before it exploded in the heart of the compound, leaving a huge crater and damaging surrounding buildings. The US military said in a statement that American forces had detained two suspects in the bombing.
An Interior Ministry official confirmed that two Iraqi police and one Iraqi soldier were killed, and a medic at Mosuls main hospital said it had received 65 wounded people, most of them civilians. The latest deaths bring the total number of US casualties since the March 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein to 4,271, according to an AFP count based on the independent website icasualties.org. The US army spokesman confirmed that Fridays blast was the deadliest for American forces since March 10 last year, when a suicide bomber struck a foot patrol in Baghdad, killing five soldiers.
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