IRAQ: US troops killed eight US-trained Iraqi guards and a Jordanian yesterday after mistaking the Iraqis for rebels in the heartland of resistance to the American-led occupation, witnesses said.
Elsewhere in the rebellious "Sunni Triangle", where deposed dictator Saddam Hussein may be hiding, two US soldiers died, seven were wounded, and three Iraqis were reported killed in a botched raid in the town of Ramadi.
President Bush kept up pressure on the international community to back up its 130,000-strong contingent in Iraq, saying free nations cannot be neutral in the "fight between civilisation and chaos".
In a speech to returning American soldiers, Mr Bush added: "Terrorists in Iraq have attacked representatives of the civilised world, and opposing them and defeating them must be the cause of the civilised world."
UN Security Council foreign ministers from veto-holding countries France, Britain, Russia, China and the United States, are due to meet in Geneva today to discuss a US-drafted resolution to get more international troops and money into Iraq.
In the Iraqi town of Falluja, police officer Assem Muhammad said a joint force of local police and the US-backed security force were chasing thieves in a car shortly after midnight when US soldiers opened fire.
"They continued firing for about an hour despite our pleas for them to stop and to tell them we are police and security," Muhammad, who was wounded in the incident, said from his hospital bed in Falluja, 50 km west of Baghdad.
Nearly 24 hours later, US military authorities still had no official comment on what had happened.
They did say US forces had come under a rocket-propelled grenade attack in the area and one American soldier was wounded.
Other police officers confirmed Muhammad's report and put the toll at eight dead guards and three suspected bandits. At least six police and guards were also wounded.
The Jordanian military hospital in the area was badly damaged in the firing, its side peppered by bullets and shells.
Spent bullet casings littered the road nearby, next to dried pools of blood.
An official at the hospital, set up in April to provide medical services to the Iraqi people, confirmed that a Jordanian guard died of wounds he received in the incident.
The Falluja Protection Force was set up by the US military with volunteers to help Iraqi police control the unruly town.
In the Ramadi incident, two US soldiers were killed and seven wounded when an American force raided a house in the town, 100 km west of Baghdad in the US-labelled "Sunni Triangle", where support for Saddam is strongest.
Pools of blood marked the sight of what witnesses described as a vicious gunbattle involving small arms and grenades in the early hours of the morning.
In confused accounts, neighbours said three Iraqis also died.
"Look at the blood all over the house," a housewife, Samam Kadhim, said.
"This is the American behaviour - aggression towards Muslim houses."
Some two hours earlier, guerrillas had detonated a roadside bomb and fired small arms at a US military convoy in central Ramadi, wounding two soldiers, a US spokesman said.
Compounding a violent period even by Iraqi standards, police battled thieves in the centre of Baghdad in the latest bout of lawlessness.
And US tanks entered Falluja's high street late afternoon in fighting where witnesses saw a five-year-old boy shot in the head.
Guerrillas have killed 71 US soldiers since Washington declared an end to major combat in Iraq on May 1st.
US officials blame attacks on Saddam loyalists and foreign Islamist fighters.
Following Washington's appeal for help, more British troops left a base in Cyprus as part of London's buildup of its 11,000-strong contingent by an extra 1,200 soldiers.
But India turned down a US request for it to send a division of at least 15,000 soldiers, arguing its forces were too busy fighting Islamic separatists in Kashmir.
France, Germany and Russia want to downgrade the US role and have called for stronger UN participation in restoring Iraqi sovereignty.
In Geneva, the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, said the world body would maintain humanitarian operations in Iraq despite continuing threats after the bloody bombing of its offices in Baghdad last month.
"We should not abandon them in their time of need," Mr Annan said. - (Reuters)