Italy's Baghdad embassy has been attacked, according to a report carried by the Italian news agency ANSA.
ANSA said a rocket or mortar round hit the second floor of the embassy shortly before midnight, causing structural damage but no injuries.
Last week, the US military said they found several rockets stashed in a street near the embassy, which has been under high alert since 19 Italians died in the November 12th suicide bomb attack on a Carabinieri military police barracks in the southern city of Nassiriya.
There have been a number of rocket and mortar attacks in central Baghdad in recent weeks, most of them aimed at the sprawling compound housing the US-led coalition administration.
Rockets hit the compound on Tuesday, but a US military spokesman said no one was hurt.
In Washington, the Pentagon said it would send thousands more Marines to Iraq next year, bolstering the next wave of US troops being deployed amid an increasingly bloody guerrilla war.
Pentagon planners said on November 6th that Washington envisaged 105,000 troops in Iraq by next May, down from the current 130,000.
At the United Nations, diplomats said it was unlikely a new UN Security Council resolution sought by US-appointed interim Iraqi leaders would be put forward before March.
The United States and close ally Britain had considered but not yet drafted a resolution welcoming a US-Iraqi timetable leading to a new ratified constitution and an elected federal government by the end of 2005.
Diplomats said Washington was in no mood to bargain over a new measure with anti-war opponents Russia, France and Germany.