Four U.S. soldiers die in blasts in Iraq

BAGHDAD – Four U.S. soldiers were killed in bomb blasts and northern Iraq and Baghdad on Tuesday, and six Iraqi policemen also died in attacks in the country’s north.

It was the deadliest day for the Americans since June 29, when four soldiers were killed in Baghdad. The next day most U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq’s cities, where their movements since have been restricted, although they have greater latitude in the countryside. Only seven American soldiers died in August.

In Tuesday’s attacks, three U.S. soldiers were slain by a roadside bomb while on patrol in Salahuddin province north of the capital, according to the U.S. military. The fourth soldier died when an explosive device targeted his patrol in southern Baghdad.

Before the latest incidents, the U.S. Defense Department put the death toll in Iraq for its civilian employees and the American military at 4,340.

It was also a bloody day for the Iraqi security forces around the oil-rich Kirkuk region of northern Iraq, the territory at the center of a land dispute among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. Two Iraqi policemen were killed and four wounded in a bomb blast on a road less than 20 miles from the city of Kirkuk.

A roadside bomb also claimed the life of Maj. Zaid Hussein, who headed a counter-terrorism police unit, and three of his men in the town of Armili, a Shiite Turkmen district, not far from Kirkuk’s provincial boundaries. The bomb was planted at an intersection on the edge of town.

Some locals blamed the attack on militants associated with al-Qaida in Iraq.

“I carried the dead body of the major,” said Hassan Hadi, a 28-year-old resident. The attack “has the fingerprints of al-Qaida, which wants to ignite sectarianism.”

Armili suffered a suicide truck bomb attack in July 2007 that killed 105 people.