BAGHDAD - At least 31 people were killed and scores wounded in attacks against Iraqi security forces and civilians on Saturday, the second anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.
In the most deadly attack, a roadside bomb killed 15 Iraqi soldiers and wounded others on the main highway through Latifiyah, 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Baghdad, a defense ministry official said.
The bomb exploded at 7:30 am (0330 GMT) as a convoy of Iraqi troops passed through the town, the official said. No other details were immediately available.
On the same road just outside Latifiyah, five civilians were gunned down by attackers, said a doctor at a nearby hospital.
The area around Latifiyah, populated by a mix of Sunnis and Shiites, is called the "triangle of death" for its high rate of murders and kidnappings.
Also south of Baghdad, four drivers were killed and four wounded in an ambush on a 14-truck trade ministry convoy traveling between Kut and the capital, an interior ministry source said.
Truck drivers have been killed with increasing frequency in recent months as insurgents hit economic targets and the road from Kut, 175 kilometres (110 miles) southeast of the capital, has become a regular target for insurgents.
In Baghdad, a deputy to anti-American cleric Moqtada Sadr was killed in the southern Dura district as he drove to an anti-US protest in the capital, a Sadr official said.
Assailants in another car opened fire on Sayed Fadel al-Shoki, deputy director of Sadr's office in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala, killing him and wounding another Sadr deputy from the nearby city of Al-Hor, the Sadr official said.
Dura has been riven by sectarian strife. A US army officer in the district has described a low-level war in Dura between Sadr's Mehdi Army militia and Sunni insurgents.
In the northern city of Mosul, a suicide car bomber in an Opel killed a police officer and a civilian and wounding 14 other people, including 11 policemen, medical sources and police told AFP.
The bomber targeted a police car and several policemen in the street directing traffic, the medical sources said.
An ex-police officer, Colonel Abdul Aziz Farman Shahine, who resigned from the force last September, was shot dead by unknown gunmen outside his home in the northwestern section of the city, police said.
Mosul turned into an urban war zone in November when rebels executed Iraqi security officers and over-ran police stations, causing the police force to virtually collapse.
A mortar also struck the al-Salam hospital in southern Mosul, wounding two Iraqi soldiers, said Dr. Moutaz Jabar at the hospital.
Iraqi soldiers had set up a post in the hospital last month in order to fight insurgents.
In other violence, an Iraqi soldier and a civilian were killed in a roadside bombing in Mashaada, 30 kilometres north of Baghdad, said army Captain Assad Saddad.
Iraqi army and police killed one insurgent and arrested three suspected insurgents in a morning clash in Balad, 75 kilometres (45 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
The corpses of an Iraqi contractor and a truck driver were found in Dujail, north of the capital. Rebels in the Sunni Muslim heartland north of Baghdad have killed dozens of people suspected of working with the Americans and the new Iraqi government.
Meanwhile in the southern port of Basra, two civilians were wounded around in another roadside bomb targeting an Iraq police convoy, police said.
Separately, eight Iraqis were wounded when a bomb exploded in the central market of Mussaeib, 50 kilometres (38 miles) south of Baghdad, medics said.
04/09/2005 17:30 GMT