Thursday 03 February 2005, 21:09 Makka Time, 18:09 GMT
Iraqi fighters staged major attacks in and around Baghdad on Thursday - the worst day of violence since the elections.
Initial police reports indicated two policemen were killed and 14 others wounded. At least 36 other Iraqi security members are listed as missing.
Police said fighters attacked a police convoy as it travelled between Diwaniya, 180km (112 miles) south of Baghdad, and the capital.
US forces sealed off the site of the ambush, near the Abu Ghraib area on Baghdad's western fringes. Police said some of the wounded were treated in hospital in Diwaniya.
The attack came a day after fighters in the north dragged Iraqi soldiers off a bus and shot 12 of them dead, and suggests the country's 22-month-long ant-US campaign is far from over.
At least a dozen civilians were also killed in Thursday's bloodshed, the worst this week.
Unabated attacks
Three Iraqi soldiers were also killed and three wounded in a bomb attack on Thursday morning in Yathrib, 75km north of Baghdad.
"A man was arrested at the scene of the attack but was freed due to lack of evidence," Captain Amjad Saad said.
Elsewhere, a soldier and a woman were killed in a bomb blast targeting an army convoy at Shorgat, 300km north of Baghdad, a police officer said, explaining that the woman was driving behind the convoy.
And in a rare case of civilians fighting back, villagers killed five fighters who attacked them for taking part in the elections, police said on Thursday.
More deaths
Earlier, two Iraqi employees of a US military base were shot dead and four of his colleagues wounded while on their way to work in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, a medical source said.
One of the wounded men, Raid Rizuqi, said he and his friends were driving to work when fighters opened fire from another car.
Baquba's general hospital confirmed they received one corpse riddled with bullets.
Also on Thursday, an Iraqi soldier was killed as assailants opened fire as he was leaving his home in Baghdad, officials said.
In another incident, the governor of Anbar province, a rebel stronghold west of the capital, escaped assassination on Thursday when a roadside bomb exploded near his car in Ramadi.
House destroyed
In a separate development, Aljazeera has learned that an unknown number of US soldiers were killed and wounded when a house used as a US military headquarters was destroyed in al-Qaim city in western Baghdad.
Witnesses reported other US troops firing back, hitting several civilian bystanders.
Meanwhile, in northern Iraq, a mortar attack on a US position fell short and killed two civilians and wounded six in Tal Afar, the US military said.
"The insurgent minority attempted to fire mortar rounds at the Tal Afar Castle, instead missing and killing and wounding innocent Iraqis," the military said in a statement.
Tal Afar, west of the northern city of Mosul, has been the scene of violence for months between US forces and anti-US fighters.
Marines killed
On Wednesday two US marines were killed in action in Iraq's western province of Anbar, the US military said.
"A marine assigned to 1st Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action yesterday [Wednesday], bringing to two the number of marines who died while conducting security and stability operations in the Anbar province," the military said in a statement on Thursday.
Anbar is a huge, predominantly Sunni area which stretches westwards from the outskirts of Baghdad to the Saudi, Jordanian and Syrian borders, and includes the towns of Falluja and Ramadi.
The marines' death raised the overall toll for US soldiers killed in Iraq to 1441 since the US-led invasion of March 2003, according to Pentagon figures.