Iraq bombings kill at least eight
Meanwhile, Syria weighed in against a proposed security pact and said U.S. troops should leave.
BAGHDAD - Bombs killed at least eight people yesterday across Iraq and wounded dozens of others, officials said. Syria's president blamed the U.S. military presence for Iraq's instability and called on U.S. troops to leave.
In the northern city of Mosul, a roadside bomb ripped through an Iraqi army patrol soon after sundown, killing three soldiers and wounding four others, police said.
U.S. and Iraqi troops have been fighting for months to clear al-Qaeda in Iraq and about a dozen other Sunni insurgent groups from Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city.
To the south, a bomb attached to a bike wrapped in a trash bag exploded outside a cafe in Khalis, 50 miles north of Baghdad, killing at least two people and wounding 13, including the city mayor, police said.
In Anbar province, a suicide bomber blew herself up at a hospital in a suburb of Fallujah, west of the capital. Talib al-Hassnawi, a member of Fallujah's municipal council, said three people were killed and five were wounded.
A car bomb was discovered yesterday behind the governor's office in the northern oil city of Kirkuk. Police became suspicious and summoned U.S. troops, who cleared the area and detonated the vehicle without casualties, Police Col. Taha Salahuddin said. Four men were arrested, he added.
In Baghdad, six people, three of them police, were wounded by a roadside bomb in the city's east, the U.S. military said.
The attack near Fallujah occurred one day after a suicide bombing killed eight people and wounded 17 at a police checkpoint near Ramadi, about 25 miles to the west.
The violence comes two months after the United States handed control of Anbar province to the Iraqis and shows that militants have not given up the fight despite setbacks at the hands of U.S. and Iraqi forces.
The attacks occurred as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is studying the U.S. response to the government's request for changes in a draft security agreement that would keep U.S. troops in the country until the end of 2011.
The draft agreement has drawn sharp criticism from Iraqi Shiite clerics and Shiite-dominated Iran. Tehran's closest Arab ally, Syria, lashed out yesterday against the pact.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said U.S. troops contribute to regional instability and should pull out of Iraq as soon as possible. Assad pointed to a recent American cross-border raid into Syria as evidence that the United States will use Iraq as a base to attack its neighbors.
