Insurgents launched a wave of attacks in Iraq, killing six Iraqi national guardsmen in a suicide car bombing and four U.S. soldiers in separate incidents in Baghdad and the volatile west of the country. A roadside bomb on Tuesday also killed a local police chief in the capital, just hours before interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi returned from a 10-day foreign trip during which he tried to win neighbouring countries' support in stabilising Iraq. The suicide car bomb blast at a checkpoint outside the town of Baquba wounded six other Iraqi guardsmen, said National Guard Lieutenant Mohamed al-Dulaimi at the scene. Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, has been the scene of numerous insurgent strikes in recent months, including a suicide car bomb last week that killed 70 people, many of them young men lining up to join the police force. The U.S. military said two American soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb blast overnight on Baghdad's western outskirts. And two U.S. marines were killed in action in the violent Anbar province in the country's west. The four deaths raise to 681 the number of American troops killed in action since the war to oust Saddam Hussein. Besides attacking U.S. soldiers, insurgents often target Iraq's fledgling security forces, accusing them of collaborating with some 160,000 foreign troops in the country. Early on Tuesday, a roadside bomb in Baghdad's upscale Mansour district killed the head of a local police station and wounded three of his bodyguards, police said. --SP 2111 Local Time 1811 GMT
