A suicide bomber trailed by five cars loaded with armed insurgents slammed into a wall outside the home of an Iraqi special forces police officer Saturday in the city of Samarra, killing at least nine people on the street, officials said. In another attack in the same region, insurgents rounded up eight police at a checkpoint outside the western city of Ramadi, then marched them into their office and shot them to death, police said Saturday. The attack was on Friday. In another suicide attack Sunday, a bomber who hid explosives under watermelons in the back of a pickup truck slammed into a police headquarters in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, killing five people and wounding eight others, officials said. The U.S. military also confirmed the deaths of two more Marines in Thursday's ambush in Fallujah. That brought the death toll from the suicide car bomb and ensuing small-arms fire to at least four Marines with a Marine and a sailor still missing and presumed dead, the military said. The lethal ambush on a convoy carrying female U.S. troops in Fallujah underscored the difficulties of keeping women away from the front lines in a war where such boundaries are far from clear-cut. At least one woman was killed, and 11 of the 13 wounded troops were female. The attacks in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, and Saturday's suicide bombing in Samarra, 60 miles northwest of the capital, were startling indications that two major American military campaigns last year to eradicate insurgents in those cities may have failed. Both attacks signaled the reappearance of militants capable of carrying out sophisticated attacks, according to a report of The Associated Press.
