BAGHDAD, Iraq — The U.S. military said yesterday that four more American troops were killed Wednesday, a Marine in the central city of Ramadi and three soldiers targeted by a car bombing in southwest Baghdad.

Their deaths, along with those of 14 Marines in western Iraq announced earlier, brought Wednesday's toll for U.S. forces to 18.

The start of August has been among the bloodiest stretches for U.S. troops since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and non-active duty service members have borne the brunt.

Twenty Marines killed in two separate incidents this week — 14 on Wednesday, six on Monday — were reservists, and the soldiers killed Wednesday were from the Georgia National Guard.

About 30 percent of the 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are from the National Guard and Reserves.

As of yesterday, at least 1,826 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 1,406 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

The news of more U.S. fatalities came on a day in which the Iraqi prime minister announced a new security plan and said Iraqi forces were making the country safer, while the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq said that data showed the tempo of insurgent attacks was decreasing.

"The security situation is improving, especially Iraqi security forces with regard to both quality and quantity," said Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who outlined a 12-point security program for Iraq yesterday.

Under the new plan, four separate intelligence services will be consolidated into one central operation, and responsibility over security of the country's infrastructure — such as oil pipelines and the power grid — will be put in the hands of Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi.

Al-Jaafari provided few other details of the plan, beyond general pledges, for example, to secure Iraq's borders and improve relations with its neighbors.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the military spokesman, said later, "The numbers that we see indicate that [insurgents] can't generate the same tempo" of attacks as in previous months. The 13 car bombs detonated across Iraq last week represented the fewest since April, Alston said, although he declined to provide data for other forms of insurgent attacks such as roadside bombs.

"This is not an expanding insurgency," Alston added. "What we are seeing is probably the opposite."

In Baghdad, the three soldiers killed Wednesday night were from the 48th Brigade of the Georgia National Guard, which arrived in Iraq in May. Second Lt. Selena Owens, a spokeswoman with the unit, said another soldier was seriously wounded.

Elsewhere in Iraq yesterday, three policemen were killed in Kirkuk, and 20 miles to the south, in Daquq, a suicide car bomb detonated, killing four and wounding five.

Lawyer: Oil-for-food

ex-chief a scapegoat

UNITED NATIONS — A U.N.-established inquiry into corruption in the $64 billion oil-for-food program will accuse the defunct program's director, Benon Sevan, of receiving cash kickbacks for steering lucrative Iraqi oil contracts to an Egyptian oil trader, according to Sevan's lawyer.

Former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who is heading the independent panel, is to release a third interim report Tuesday that the lawyer, Eric Lewis, said will also charge Sevan, of Cyprus, with refusing to cooperate.

Lewis, who said Sevan is being made a scapegoat to deflect criticism of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said that the charges, which were outlined in a confidential letter from the Volcker committee to Sevan last week, are "flatly false" and that he is going public now to get his client's side of the story out before Volcker issues the report.