BAGHDAD, July 21 (AFP) - At least 11 people including a US soldier were killed in a string of attacks in the Iraqi capital and known rebel hotspots on Wednesday, adding to the security headache for the new Iraqi government.
The trail of blood led from a hospital in Baghdad via a car bomb in a residential district of the capital to fighting between insurgents and US soldiers in the restive city of Ramadi.
Iraq's three-week-old government faces the task of quelling an insurgency that festered during the US-led occupation and carries out almost daily attacks against the security forces, targeted assassinations and hostage-taking of foreigners in an apparently organised campaign of chaos.
Two people were killed and four wounded when a missile ripped through the seventh floor of the Adnan Khairallah hospital on the Tigris river in Baghdad, although it was not immediately clear if the site was itself the target.
"We heard three loud explosions and then a missile hit the seventh floor head on," said doctor Mohammed Tafash.
The missile punctured the glass front and passed through two wards, said an AFP correspondent on the scene. Remains of medical equipment and broken glass littered the blood-stained floor.
Another three people were killed when a car bomb ripped through a residential neighbourhood of the capital, sending body parts hurtling onto the roof of nearby houses, police and witnesses said.
Three mutilated bodies were seen covered in white and green cloth near the site of the blast in a small side street flanked by low-level apartments in southeast Baghdad.
"The car does not belong to anyone in the neighbourhood. Someone came, put it there and left," said Hashim Hussein, 28, who lives in the area.
"There were five men standing in the street next to the car who are the victims of the explosion which was very powerful to the extent that body parts were thrown to the roof of the neighbouring houses," said Hussein.
"We collected the parts and dropped them down on to the street."
A smouldering wreck of twisted metal, corndoned off by Iraqi police, was all that was left of the car.
Fire engines appeared on the scene to douse the flames, an AFP reporter there said, adding that at least three other cars in the area had been damaged.
In the rebel city of Ramadi, at least four people were killed and 14 wounded in clashes and a suspected car bomb blast, police and hospital officials said.
A US military spokesman said American soldiers were battling insurgents in the rebel Sunni bastion, 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Baghdad, but denied there had been a car bombing.
"Three brothers, Sattar, Mustapha and Yussef Khalil were killed in a car bomb explosion," said a doctor at the main hospital in Ramadi, capital of the restive al-Anar province.
A second doctor said a fourth corpse had been brought to the hospital along with 14 other wounded people amid the chaos, which police said was a result of clashes between US soldiers and rebel forces.
One US soldier was also killed and six wounded when their patrol hit a roadside bomb shortly after midnight in Duluiyah a town near Samarra where fierce fighting overnight between Americans and insurgents claimed five Iraqi lives.
The latest US casualty brought to 662 the number of American troops killed in action in Iraq since the start of the US-led war in March 2003, based on Pentagon figures.
US Central Command reported Tuesday two US soldiers and two marines killed in the western Anbar province.
Police also said the mutilated body of an Iraqi scientist and an unidentified corpse were found in Samarra, scene of sporadic deadly clashes and where a powerful suicide car bomb attack on July 8 on the city's Iraqi National Guard headquarters killed five US soldiers and four Iraqi guardsmen.
Elsewhere, a policeman died and three were wounded in the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk when their patrol was targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, police said.
In Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, four members of a special security unit charged with protecting the country's power installations were injured when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb, according to hospital sources.