BAGHDAD - Eight US soldiers have been killed across Iraq over the Christmas period, as a series of attacks battered the capital and an advance batch of Japanese soldiers left home to prepare for deployment to the war-torn country.

The latest US troop fatalities came Friday with one soldier killed defusing a roadside bomb near Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, and another when his convoy hit a booby-trap explosive between Baquba and Samarra, said Captain Jefferson Wolfe.

"There was an IED (improvised explosive device) attack on a convoy, two soldiers were injured, one of whom later died," Wolfe said.

"Soldiers returned fire and were able to kill two former regime elements."

Their deaths took to eight the number of US soldiers killed in action in Iraq since Christmas Eve.

On Thursday night, two US soldiers died during a mortar attack on a US army base near Baquba, military spokeswoman Josslyn Aberle said Friday.

Four other soldiers were wounded in the attack, she said, while an officer in Baquba put the wounded toll at six.

The latest deaths raise to 209 the number of US soldiers killed in action in Iraq since US President George W. Bush declared major combat over May 1.

On Wednesday, three US soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division were killed in a roadside bombing near Samarra and another from the 1st Armoured Division died in a Baghdad blast.

Two US soldiers were also wounded during a gun battle Friday in the northern capital of Mosul, said Major Hugh Cate of the 101st Airborne Division.

Further south, two Polish soldiers were wounded early Friday in a bomb and mortar attack on their convoy outside a military base, a spokesman for the Polish military said.

"One soldier was wounded to the hand and another to the leg. They are in serious but stable condition," Colonel Zdzislaw Gnatowski was quoted as saying by the Polish news agency PAP.

The Polish contingent has so far lost one soldier in combat in Iraq since the start of the US-led war late March.

And to the north in Khaldiyah, near the flaspoint town of Fallujah, witnesses said US soldiers sealed off part of a town and ordered residents out before launching a missile strike on the home of a suspected anti-coalition rebel.

Meanwhile, the first groups of Japan's military contingent left for the Middle East on Friday to set the stage for a humanitarian mission in Iraq, the nation's most dangerous deployment of personnel since World War II.

Television footage showed airforce servicemen, clad in civilian clothes, leaving New Tokyo International Airport at Narita, just east of Tokyo.

They were headed for Qatar, where the main US airbase is located, and Kuwait, where Japan's airforce planes will be based, to transport medical and other supplies to Iraqi airports, Japanese media said.

Copyright 2003 AFP

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