Two U.S. soldiers killed in blasts

BAGHDAD – Two U.S. soldiers were killed in a pair of roadside bombings over the weekend, the U.S. military announced Monday.

One soldier died in a bomb blast Sunday night in Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad, which left two other soldiers wounded, the military said. No further information was provided.

The province has a predominantly Sunni Arab population. Many Sunnis who fought Americans in the past have formed an alliance with the U.S. military in the past year, but other Sunni fighters, often affiliated with al-Qaida in Iraq, have continued to fight U.S. forces.

The second bombing occurred Sunday afternoon in Qadisiya province in southern Iraq. One soldier was killed and two others wounded when the blast ripped into a patrol just west of the province’s capital, Diwaniya, the military said.

The U.S. Army also announced the death of a third soldier Saturday from noncombat-related causes.

The deaths, announced on Memorial Day, raised the U.S. military’s fatalities in Iraq to at least 4,082 since March 2003, when American-led forces invaded the country, according to icasualties.org, an independent Web site that tracks military casualties.

Elsewhere, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle in Tarmiya, about 30 miles north of Baghdad, tried Monday to blow up the house of a Sunni tribal leader, Sheik Said Jassim, whose son heads a Sunni paramilitary unit that fights alongside the Americans. Two policemen, a member of the unit and a civilian were killed when the bomber detonated his explosives at the last checkpoint about 60 yards from the sheik’s house, said a Sunni member of the paramilitary group.