BAGHDAD, Feb 2: At least 21 Iraqis were killed on Thursday, including 10 in a pair of Baghdad car bombings, while the US military said five of its troops lost their lives in attacks across the country.

Ten Iraqis died and 55 were wounded in two separate car bombings in Baghdad’s Al-Amin neighbourhood — one near a gas station and the other in a market — an interior ministry official said.

“Most of the casualties were from the blast in the market,” the official said. The other car bomb blew up a parked gas tanker, setting off a huge fireball.

The US military announced on Thursday that five soldiers died a day earlier in separate rebel attacks.

Three soldiers were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad.

The fourth succumbed to wounds suffered when his unit came under small-arms fire in the southwest of the capital.

A marine also died of his wounds after coming under small-arms fire near Fallujah.

Four Iraqis were killed in heavy fighting reportedly between the Mehdi Army militia of Shia scholar Moqtada Sadr and US forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City, a US military spokesman said.

“The coalition forces conducted a raid in Sadr City to search for a known terrorist from Ansar al-Sunna group,” the spokesman said.

He said a US helicopter came under fire from some men on a nearby rooftop. “Another helicopter of the coalition forces returned fire to eliminate the threat,” he said, adding that “four individuals were killed.”

He did not say whether the four dead were members of the Mehdi Army. An interior ministry official said the fight was between US forces and Sadr’s militia, and that a woman was also killed in the fighting.

In a separate incident, insurgents attacked an oil storage facility near the northern city of Kirkuk setting off a massive blaze, an official with the Northern Oil Company said.

In Mosul, rebels killed three policemen and wounded 10 in separate attacks, police said, while gunmen assassinated the police intelligence officer responsible for an area south of Basra and his driver.

The US military said two children died in the town of Hit during a gunfight between security forces and insurgents on Wednesday.

In other violence, a high-ranking industry ministry official, Mary Hamza al-Rubai, was kidnapped on her way to work by gunmen who stopped her car but let her driver go.

The US military said that 11 Syrians, suspected to be insurgents, were captured on Thursday during an Iraqi army raid in the restive town of Ramadi.

It said the raid against a suspected foreign rebel cell operating in Ramadi led to the capture of 15 suspected insurgents, four of them Iraqis and the rest from Syria.—AFP