4 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq blasts

BAGHDAD — Four U.S. soldiers died in roadside bombings Tuesday and Wednesday, the U.S. military said, bringing to 10 the number of Americans killed in Iraq since Monday.

Three U.S. soldiers and an interpreter were killed in a roadside bombing late Tuesday in Nineveh province, a military statement said. In recent weeks U.S. and Iraqi forces have stepped up operations against Sunni insurgents in the area.

An American soldier was killed in eastern Baghdad on Wednesday morning by an armor-piercing roadside bomb, the U.S. military said in a statement.

Those fatalities brought the death toll for American troops in Iraq this month to at least 25 — well below figures of last year but an increase from the 19 who died in May, the lowest monthly tally of the war.

In all, at least 4,109 U.S. military-service members have died in the Iraq war, according to an Associated Press count.

Meanwhile, Iraqi officials said a U.S. airstrike killed four members of a family north of Baghdad shortly after midnight on Wednesday. Iraqi and U.S. officials provided conflicting accounts.

Capt. Ahmed al-Azwawi, a police official in Samra, a village about seven miles south of Tikrit, said U.S. troops were conducting an operation in the area when a man fired shots in the air with an AK-47. Azwawi said the man, who sold propane gas for a living, was afraid thieves were in the vicinity. U.S. soldiers then retreated and called in an airstrike, Azwawi said, killing the man, his wife and two of their children.

The U.S. military said in a statement that soldiers carried out the airstrike after ground troops were shot at during an operation targeting al-Qaida in Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group.

Later Wednesday morning, U.S. troops in Baghdad killed three men who shot at them near Baghdad International Airport, the military said in a statement. The soldiers were in a parked armored car when men in a moving vehicle shot at them. U.S. soldiers returned fire, the military said. The car slammed into a wall and burst into flames, the military said, killing its three occupants. U.S. soldiers recovered a weapon from the vehicle.

In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, south of Baghdad, a bomb inside a minibus killed at least two people Wednesday night in the old part of the city, Iraqi security and health officials in the province said.

Elsewhere in Iraq on Wednesday, a Mosul city councilman and his driver were fatally shot in an ambush.