IRAQ: Insurgents stormed an Iraqi army checkpoint as dawn broke north of Baghdad yesterday, killing 12 people, including nine soldiers.
Al-Qaeda's Iraq wing claimed the attack in a web posting.
Following in a pattern of closely co-ordinated attacks with rockets, infantry manoeuvres and a suicide truck bomb, it was a reminder of the military potential of the Sunni Arab insurgency as the United States prepares to hand much of Iraq's security over to the new Shia-led government's fledgling armed forces.
About 20 army volunteers were killed on Sunday in Baghdad when a suicide bomber walked among them at a recruiting station, the second such attack on that scale in the capital in a week.
Recruitment is strong amid mass unemployment but US commanders say they are unsure how long it may take for the new army and police to be fully trained to face the guerrillas.
As the sun rose on Monday over their checkpoint on a road at Khalis, near the city of Baquba, 65 kilometres northeast of Baghdad, a detachment of Iraqi soldiers found themselves under fire from several directions, survivors told police officers.
Rocket-propelled grenades targeted sentries in their watchtower, letting other guerrillas move in close to rip into the soldiers on the ground with heavy machine gun fire.
Alerted, other troops headed to the rescue. They appeared to fall into a carefully prepared trap, running into a car bomb.
"We heard the checkpoint was hit. We headed there and a pick-up truck blew up on the road," said one young soldier lying in a hospital bed with shrapnel wounds to the leg.
"It was definitely a suicide bomber because we were covered in his flesh."
Police said three civilians were killed and one soldier were wounded in an explosion, which left blackened and twisted pieces of the pick-up truck lying amid its pulped cargo of water melons.
A month ago troops at Khalis suffered an attack by a suicide bomber who sat in their mess hall and blew himself up at lunchtime, killing more than 20 soldiers.
In recent months insurgents have targeted police stations in co-ordinated raids, sometimes overrunning them entirely. US air power, however, ensures they cannot hold territory for long, other than in urban areas where they can for a time mingle with the civilian population.
In the troubled northern town of Tal Afar, between Mosul and the Syrian border, hospital officials said five civilians including a child were killed and 18 wounded in shelling overnight.