A roadside bomb killed seven U.S. troops in northwest Baghdad and two Marines died in western Iraq on Thursday.
Three weeks before the Jan. 30 elections, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq acknowledged that security is poor in four of 18 Iraqi provinces. But Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz told a briefing in the capital that delaying the vote would only increase the danger.
The soldiers were on patrol Thursday evening when their Bradley fighting vehicle hit the explosive, the military said in a statement on Friday. Everyone inside the Bradley was killed.
The latest deaths brought the number of U.S. troops killed since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003 to 1,350, according to an Associated Press count.
Elsewhere, police in the southern city of Basra found two charred and beheaded bodies in a house used by election officials.
