Suicide bomber kills 10 in Iraq; two GIs die

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Two dozen people died in a surge of violence in northern Iraq, including 10 at a soccer game hit by a suicide car bombing, police said Friday, while the country's spiraling sectarian and political bloodshed killed at least 17 others elsewhere.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed Friday in restive Anbar province west of the capital, the U.S. command said. It said only that they died "due to enemy action." At least 17 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq since July 27, all but two of them in Anbar.

As of Friday, at least 2,586 members of the U.S. military have died since the war began, according to an Associated Press count.

The suicide driver struck Thursday night during a soccer match between local teams in Hadhra, 180 miles north of Baghdad.

Seven of the dead were spectators and the other three were policemen providing security for the game, police Col. Abdul Karim Ahmed Khalaf said. Six civilians and nine officers were wounded, he said.

The attack occurred the day after a pair of bombs exploded on a soccer field in Baghdad, killing 11 young players and spectators.

In Mosul, 45 miles north of Hadhra, armed clashes erupted Friday after a car bomb killed four police officers, including a colonel.

Eight insurgents were killed and five cars rigged with explosives were found before order was restored, police Maj. Gen. Withiq al-Hamdani said.

Also Friday, two people were killed and four wounded when three mortar shells exploded near Baghdad, said police Lt. Bilal Ali Majid. Earlier in the day, an engineer was fatally shot and an unidentified body was found elsewhere in the city.

In Kut, 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, six bodies were found Friday in the Tigris, four of them decapitated, officials said. It appeared they were victims of sectarian death squads responsible for escalating Sunni-Shiite conflict.

Also Friday, the U.S. military said American forces killed at least three insurgents during an airstrike and multiple raids southeast of Baghdad the day before.