Five US soldiers killed by roadside bombs in Iraq

BAGHDAD - Five US soldiers have been killed and five wounded in roadside bomb attacks in little over 24 hours, the US military said on Sunday.

Three soldiers were killed and another wounded when their patrol struck a roadside device near Tuz, some 180km north of Baghdad, late on Friday, the military said in a statement. It gave no further details.

In western Iraq, on the main road leading to the border with Jordan, one US soldier was killed and three wounded when their combat patrol hit a roadside bomb early on Sunday.

In Baghdad, a fifth soldier died when his vehicle hit a device in the west of the city on Saturday, the military said. A second soldier was wounded in that attack.

Roadside bombs, which the military calls improvised explosive devices, are the worst killer of US troops in Iraq, responsible for more than a third of total deaths.

They are made up of small and sometimes large amounts of explosive, packed with artillery rounds, buried in the side of the road and detonated as US military vehicles pass. Sometimes they are disguised in dead animals, plastic bags or tin cans.

US commanders have acknowledged insurgents have been designing more effective bombs, killing entire crews of armoured vehicles with increasing frequency.

In one incident last week, 14 Americans in one vehicle were killed by a landmine, the deadliest attack of its kind in the entire conflict in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.

A US general said on Friday IED attacks on his convoys had doubled in a year and US forces had increased the amount of armour on vehicles.

A total of 1850 US troops have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

While large-scale suicide car bombings of Iraqi targets are the mark of al Qaeda-linked militants, IEDs are mainly the work of Iraqi nationalist and Sunni Arab guerrillas, US military intelligence analysts say.

- REUTERS