Iraq reels after weekend of carnage

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Baghdad - Iraqi and American forces battled to regain the initiative on Monday after two days of intense violence in and around Baghdad left dozens of Iraqis, 11 US soldiers and a European journalist dead.

Sunday saw a fierce surge in insurgent attacks, including a car bombing in a Baghdad shopping street, a suicide assault on a Samarra police station and a deadly ambush on an American patrol north of the capital.

"There are going to be these rough spots and the enemy is not just going to sit back and wait for us to clean them out and be done with it," said Major Joe Edstrom, a US military public affairs officer.

"We have to expect that there will be days like this. We are just going to do what they always do and just drive on, press forward, take measures and steps and ensure that there are not more casualties," he said.

In Sunday's bloodiest attack, a car bomb ripped through a crowded street in Bayaa, a mainly Shi'a commercial area of Baghdad, demolishing two shops and killing at least 33 people.

Such spectacular massacres are carried out by Sunni insurgents to discredit Iraq's fragile government and its US allies, while provoking Shi'a reprisals and leaving the country all but ungovernable.

Baghdad and Washington have responded with a massive security plan, backed up by a 28 000-strong "surge" in US troop reinforcements, designed to quell sectarian fighting and hunt down the car bomb gangs.

But the security forces themselves sometimes fall victim to increasingly audacious insurgent attacks, particularly in a belt of violent cities and rural communities in the lawless region around the capital.

On Sunday, insurgents ambushed a US patrol in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, killing six American soldiers and a civilian European journalist travelling with them. Two more soldiers on the patrol were injured.

The US military has released few details of the attack, in which a Stryker armoured vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb.

Iraqi police officials told AFP that a US convoy was ambushed by insurgents near the village Zaghaniya, five kilometres north of Baquba, but it was not clear if they were referring to the same attack.

The journalist who died in the ambush has yet to be identified.

Also on Sunday, an Iraqi police station in the restive Sunni city of Samarra was attacked by a suicide bomber who ploughed a van packed with explosives into the gate during a fierce gunbattle between police and insurgents.

American troops from a nearby base of the 82nd Airborne Division rushed to the scene and fought a running street battle with the fleeing attackers, but 12 Iraqi police were killed and 11 wounded in the attack, the US military said.

The Samarra attack was the third in four days against police bases housing Sunni officers recruited by the government to fight the Sunni-led insurgency after several Iraqi tribes switched their allegiance to Baghdad.

In Baghdad, US and Iraqi forces remained on the offensive and killed between eight and ten Shi'a extremists in a raid on a militant safe house, they said.

US military spokesperson Major General William Caldwell said the gang was suspected of importing deadly armour piercing bombs from Iran and, although the raiding party did not catch the suspect they were looking for, US forces find 150 mortar rounds and a torture chamber.

"They found a room that clearly had bloodstains in it, handcuffs, a facial mask... all the signs exhibited the conditions we've seen before in other rooms that have been used to kill people and conduct torture," he said.

The raiders called in an air strike after coming under fire during the raid, and afterwards destroyed the building with demolition charges.