Police said a roadside bomb killed five people near a shelter used as a police recruiting center in northeast Baghdad’s Shi’ite-dominated neighborhood of Binouk. Six other people were wounded, they said. Most of the victims were recruits lining up outside the shelter.

In Balad Ruz, an ethnically mixed city 45 miles northeast of the capital, another roadside bomb exploded near a convoy carrying the police chief of Balad Ruz, Col Faris al-Amirie, police said.

Six of al-Amirie’s guards were killed and eight others were hurt, but the chief escaped injury, they said.
In Sadiyah, 60 miles north of Baghdad, police said a cluster of three attacks took place around 10:40 am, killing five people and wounding 18 others.

The US military announced the deaths of two American soldiers, killed by an explosion near their vehicle in Iraq’s northern Ninevah province. Two other soldiers were wounded by the blast, which occurred on Wednesday, the military said in a statement.

At least 3,844 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003. The figure includes seven military civilians. The Iraqi raids took place over the past three days in Jbala, about 45 miles south of the Iraqi capital, and in the Hamrin mountains in northeastern Iraq, near the border with Iran, the government said in two statements.

Thirty-four suspects were arrested in Jbala, and 39 in the Hamrin area, the government said. In Hamrin, Iraqi troops also safely detonated six booby-trapped cars and destroyed a hospital that had been taken over by insurgents in the village of al-Bu Talha, it said.

US chopper opens fire in Baghdad
US helicopters opened fire after a ground patrol came under attack southeast of Baghdad on Thursday, and Iraqi police said three officers were killed and one wounded in the strike,  AP reports from Baghdad.

The fighting occurred near Salman Pak, a predominantly Sunni area that has been the subject of a US military campaign aimed at routing insurgents from rural strongholds and disrupting the flow of weapons to the capital. Ground forces called for air support after coming under small-arms fire near the city, some 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, a US military official said.

A US-Iraqi joint security station in the area had come under fire three times earlier in the day, the official said.