Violence Flares in Iraq; 2 Marines Among the Dead

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Sunni terrorists launched deadly attacks around Iraq on yesterday as a suicide truck bomb killed two American Marines and 10 Iraqis in Anbar province, a female bomber struck a police station in eastern Iraq, and a car bomb exploded in Baghdad near a well-known restaurant.

Confrontations once more jolted Sadr City, the capital's Shiite slum, where the American military said its forces fired a Hellfire missile that hit a car carrying terrorists and rockets. Police said the strike killed eight civilians, but the Americans said no civilians were in the area.

The military announced that an air strike yesterday morning had killed another fighter who was planting bomb wire.

The deaths came amid an upswing in bloodshed that began in March when the Iraqi government ordered an offensive in the southern city of Basra. That assault sparked ongoing fighting with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.

Iraqi officials have warned of greater violence in the months ahead as factions seek to gain advantage, with an eye to the drawdown of American troops and the American elections in the fall.

The two Marines died when the truck bomb sped into a checkpoint yesterday near Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, according to the American military, witnesses, and Iraqi security officials.

Seven policemen and three civilians died in the attack, Dr. Dia Hittit from Ramadi's general hospital said. Thirty Iraqis and two other Marines were wounded, according to Dr. Hittit and the military.

Ramadi, once a bastion of Al Qaeda in Iraq, has become relatively calm in the past year as tribes have teamed with American forces, their onetime enemies, to battle terrorists. But Sunni insurgents recently have showed new signs of life. Last week, 13 people were killed in the western city when a bomber on a motorcycle blew himself up near policemen eating lunch.

The Marines also announced yesterday that another Marine was killed and another wounded the day before when a roadside bomb exploded in Basra. The military reported Monday that a bomb had struck an American military vehicle and caused casualties but provided no other information.

[Elsewhere, America and Iran, the two nations with the most at stake in Iraq, pointedly ignored each other yesterday as Iraq's premier unsuccessfully pleaded for immediate financial and diplomatic backing from rich Arab neighbors still leery of Tehran's influence on Baghdad. Secretary of State Rice and Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki of Iran said only a brief hello and did not shake hands, the Associated Press reported.]