Agence France-Presse,
BAGHDAD: Insurgents have killed four American soldiers and two Iraqis in a spate of attacks, including the bombing of a US military convoy near Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone, officials said on Wednesday.
US military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith warned that while violence levels had dropped in and around Baghdad due to extensive operations by Iraqi and American forces, “the process is fragile and far from irrreversible.”
“The enemy still has both the will and the capacity to cause significant loss of life and damage to property,” he told reporters hours after the relative calm of Baghdad of recent weeks was shattered by the powerful roadside bomb.
Iraqi security officials said the blast near a police post just outside the Green Zone killed two Iraqi civilians and wounded three.
Smith told AFP that there was “at least one US fatality” in the attack.
An AFP correspondent at the site said a heavily armoured Stryker vehicle of the US military was badly damaged in the blast, which sent a thick plume of smoke into the sky.
The attack took place around 8:10 am (0510 GMT) as Iraqi officials and politicians were converging on the Green Zone for a conference on the reconstruction of war-torn Iraq.
At the time, hundreds of Iraqis were also queuing up to enter the Green Zone, which houses the US and British embassies and the Iraqi parliament.
The bomb had been planted at the foot of a watchtower at the end of a long row of concrete blast walls protecting a police station, just 100 metres (yards) from a main entrance to the sprawling complex.
The last Stryker in the three-vehicle convoy bore the full brunt of the explosion, which scattered fragments of metal across the street.
Soon after the blast, a US soldier, clearly shocked, sat with his head in his hands, his weapon at his feet.
His colleagues inspected the damage while two of them unloaded rucksacks and ammunition from the back of the 17-tonne armoured troop transport vehicle.
Other soldiers took up positions around the Strykers to keep back the crowds, scanning passers-by through the sights of their automatic weapons.
The long, narrow heavily armoured vehicles which are fitted with side shields capable of deflecting a rocket and most roadside bombs, are built to carry as many troops to a combat zone as quickly as possible.
In another incident on Wednesday, a US soldier was shot dead during combat operations near the northern city of Mosul, a military statement said.
Another two soldiers were killed in an explosion while conducting operations in the volatile Diyala province north of Baghdad on Tuesday, a seperate statement said, adding that another four were wounded.
The latest fatalities brought the military's losses to 857 so far in 2007, the deadliest year for the military since the March 2003 invasion.
The military's overall losses since the invasion have reached 3,862, according to an AFP tally based on Pentagon figures, which also take into account soldiers who die after leaving Iraq for treatment.
The high casualties in 2007 occurred despite the recent drop in violence across the country and came despite — or because of — a “surge” of an extra 28,500 US troops in Iraq since June.
The military suffered substantial losses in the first half of this year when Iraq's insurgent and sectarian violence was at its peak.
US and Iraqi officials now claim that bloodshed in the country is ebbing with violence down by 70 percent compared to the period before February when the surge operations were launched.
