Iraqi insurgents gunned down five soldiers and killed two police in a separate bomb attack Friday, as government forces stepped up their campaign to regain control of a war-torn country. Captain Mahmud al-Jiburi of the Kirkuk police told AFP gunmen had ambushed an Iraqi army patrol in the town of Hawija, in the north of the country, and killed five of them.
Further south in Khalis, 80 kilometres (50 miles) north-east of Bagdhad, a roadside bomb killed two Iraqi police and wounded eight people, police said.
And in Baquba, a town just north of the capital notorious for sectarian attacks by rival Sunni and Shia extremists, three bombs detonated in a crowded street market, wounding 10 people.
In the southern town of Amara the body of a policeman who was also a former member of ousted president Saddam Hussein's Baath party was found floating in the Tigris river with a bullet in the head, local police told AFP.
At least 11 more tortured corpses were found in and around the capital, in what has become a grim daily harvest of the victims of rival death squads, whose urban dirty war has pushed Iraq to the brink of all-out civil conflict.
Meanwhile, the US air force announced that F-16 fighter jets had dropped several 500 pound (227 kilo) GBU-12 laser-guided and GBU-38 satellite-guided bombs on an insurgent position near Baghdad "achieving the intended effects".