Three US soldiers and six Iraqis on Tuesday were killed in attacks across the country.
A roadside bomb exploded as a top Kurdish police official was heading to work on Tuesday, killing one of his guards and wounding him, police said.
Maj. Ahmed al-Hamawandi, the head of police in the Kurdish district of Azadi in Kirkuk, suffered minor injuries in the attack that took place at around 8:50 a.m., said police Col. Sarhat Qader.
Also in the north, in Mosul, two Kurdish peshmerga fighters were killed in the third attack of its kind since Saturday.
In another incident in this northern Iraqi city, a British civilian contractor was killed while working as a security consultant, the Foreign Office said.
"I understand that his vehicle was ambushed," a Foreign Office spokeswoman told AFP.
Two Iraqi gunmen were killed in a battle on a Baghdad police station. And in the town of Mahmudiyah, south of the capital, one policeman was killed and another injured in an attack on police headquarters.
In the meantime, also Tuesday, a roadside bomb blast killed three U.S. Marines in the eastern part of the Iraqi capital, according to a U.S. military spokesman.
Earlier, a Marine cited by Reuters said, "I don't know how many died here, (they) killed some Marines."
"It's very sad to see people die today. We are just trying to help and I don't know why the terrorists want to kill us. We just want to help Iraqis."
Elsewhere, a roadside bomb detonated near a U.S. military convoy in a residential neighborhood in southeast Baghdad on Tuesday, the military said. There was no immediate word on casualties.
The explosion took place at about 10 a.m. [local time], Army Maj. Phil Smith of the 1st Cavalry Division said. "I believe some Americans may have been involved," he said. (Albawaba.com)
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