Four soldiers were killed when a suicide car bomber attacked their checkpoint on a road south of Baghdad, the US military said tonight.
The attack came on the same day that a suicide car bomber killed nine people in Baghdad's southern Dora district.
The soldiers who died were attached to Task Force Baghdad, the statement said, but no other details were available. A military spokesman would not confirm if the soldiers were American.
A further ten people were wounded in the attack, which targeted a police patrol in a turbulent district of the city.
Iraq's Shia- and Kurdish-led government and its US backers are fighting a Sunni Arab insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives in the two-and-a-half years since the US- led invasion in March 2003.
Earlier, a suicide car bomber killed six Iraqi policemen and three civilians in the southern Dora district of Baghdad today, police said.