BAGHDAD, Dec 23 (AFP) - A US soldier and eight Iraqis -- four security personnel, three civilians and an insurgent -- died in violence over the past 24 hours, police and the military said Thursday.
The three civilians were killed in a mortar strike on the Ashra Mohammadia mosque, used by Sunnis in west Baghdad, police said.
Three people were also wounded in the attack, the latest in a wave of strikes that have targeted Muslim places of worship amid fears of sectarian strife between the long oppressed Shiite majority and the Sunni former elite.
On Sunday, twin bombings in the Shiite shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf killed 66 people and wounded nearly 200.
Also Thursday, a mortar round exploded outside a police station in Baghdad's Al-Mamun district, killing one policeman and wounding another, police said, adding that it was the third attack against the station in recent days.
One US soldier was killed and two wounded in a roadside bombing in western Baghdad, the US military said.
In late afternoon, four explosions jolted the capital but their cause was not immediately known.
In Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, a policeman was killed overnight in the third assassination by insurgents in the city in the past three days, police said.
The body of an insurgent whose bomb exploded prematurely was also found outside the city, police and the US military said.
In Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, a tribal chief Hazem Daraa was gunned down by assailants, police said.
North of Tikrit, an Iraqi national guardsman was killed and two wounded when their patrol vehicle hit a roadside bomb, an officer said.
In the so-called triangle of death just south of Baghdad, a car bomb wounded four people at a gas station outside the town of Iskandariyah, police spokesman Captain Hadi Hatef said.
On Wednesday evening, seven people were killed and 52 wounded when a fuel tanker exploded in the nearby town of Mahmudiya, the local hospital said.
Residents initially attributed the explosion to a truck bomb but a US marines spokesman said there was no evidence the tanker had been of booby-trapped.
In the southern city of Nasiriyah, the bullet-riddled body of a policeman was fished out of the Euphrates river after he went missing three days ago, police said.
Iraq's fledgling security forces have been the target of a relentless campaign of killings and bombings by insurgents.

12/23/2004 15:14 GMT - AFP