Two suicide bombers killed at least 31 people in two separate attacks on a police station and outside an Iraqi military base in northern Iraq on Sunday, the US military said.

The first attack happened at a police headquarters in Mosul, killing 13 policemen and two civilians and wounding six more, said US Army Capt. Mark Walter, a spokesman in Mosul. Earlier reports put the death toll at six.

Less than two hours later, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a parking lot outside an Iraqi army base, killing 16 and wounding seven more, Walter said. Almost all the victims were civilian workers arriving at the site, he said.

Also Sunday, gunmen killed police Col. Riyad Abdul Karim at his apartment in eastern Baghdad's Mashtal neighborhood, police Lt. Col. Hassan Challoub said. Karim was assistant police director of emergency services in the capital's Rusafa district, which encompasses the eastern side of the Tigris River.

Near the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, a suicide car bomb struck an Iraqi police convoy near a checkpoint, wounding four police officers, police Brig. Gen. Sarhad Qadr said. Insurgents have routinely launched deadly attacks in Kirkuk with the apparent aim of creating ethnic tension among the Kurdish, Sunni, Shiite and Turkmen population.

The Mosul attack came a day after a suicide bomber trailed by five cars loaded with armed insurgents slammed into a wall outside the home of an Iraqi special forces police officer in the Sunni triangle city of Samarra, killing at least nine people on the street, officials said.

In another attack in the same region, insurgents rounded up eight police officers at a checkpoint outside the western city of Ramadi, then marched them into their office and shot them to death, police said Saturday. The attack was on Friday.

The US military also confirmed the deaths of two more Marines in Thursday's ambush in Fallujah. That brought the death toll from the suicide car bomb and ensuing small-arms fire to at least four Marines, with a Marine and a sailor still missing and presumed dead, the military said.

The lethal ambush on a convoy carrying female US troops in Fallujah underscored the difficulties of keeping women away from the front lines in a war where such boundaries are far from clear-cut. At least one woman was killed, and 11 of the 13 wounded troops were female.

The attacks in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, and Saturday's suicide bombing in Samarra, 60 miles northwest of the capital, were startling indications that two major American military campaigns last year to eradicate insurgents in those cities may have failed. Both attacks signaled the reappearance of militants capable of carrying out sophisticated attacks.

But it was the Fallujah ambush that may prove the most troubling for the military.

The ambush suggested Iraqi insurgents may have regained a foothold in Fallujah, which has been occupied by US and Iraqi forces since they regained control of the city seven months ago. Fallujah is a former insurgent stronghold invaded by US forces in November. It also is the city where an Iraqi mob hung the mutilated bodies of two US contractors from a bridge.

The women were part of a team of Marines assigned to various checkpoints around Fallujah. The Marines use females at the checkpoints to search Muslim women "in order to be respectful of Iraqi cultural sensitivities," a military statement said.

The group al-Qaida in Iraq claimed it carried out the ambush, one of the single deadliest attacks against the Marines — and against women — in this country.

Thursday's attack, which raised the death toll among US military members since the beginning of the war to 1,734, according to an Associated Press count, came as Americans have grown increasingly concerned about a conflict that shows no sign of abating.

(Chinadaily.com via agencies June 27, 2005)