Six U.S. soldiers were killed in roadside bombings southwest of Baghdad, the military reported Sunday.
Two of the soldiers were killed Saturday, four others died Sunday in what appeared to be coordinated attacks.
The military said the four soldiers died as they where responding to the first explosion which killed two, indicating the attacks took places in the last minutes of Saturday and shortly after midnight on Sunday.
The names of the soldiers were not given and the military did not give an exact location of the attacks, saying only that they occurred southwest of the capital.
A Marine serving in Anbar province also died Sunday in a "non-combat related incident," the military said in a second statement.
According to the AP count 3,253 U.S. service members have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.
More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in sectarian violence since March 25, most in a series of high-profile suicide bombings. Among them were at least 152 people killed in a suicide truck bombing in Tal Afar — the deadliest single strike since the war began four years ago. Shiites, including police, went on a revenge shooting rampage afterward, killing at least 45 Sunni men.
In Other Developments:
After a heavily guarded trip to a Baghdad market, a Republican congressional delegation led by Sen. John McCain insisted Sunday that a U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown was working. Sen. Lindsey Graham said efforts by Democrats to set troop withdrawal deadlines were a "huge mistake." U.S. military spokesman Rear Adm. Mark Fox said two suicide vests were found unexploded Saturday in the Green Zone, less than a week after a rocket attack killed two Americans in the vast central Baghdad district where the U.S. and British embassies and key offices of the Iraqi government are located. A top Iraqi official is calling on Sunnis and Shiites to abandon acts of revenge and live together in peace. Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni Muslim, made the appeal in a televised speech marking the Prophet Muhammad's birthday. He said after "hundreds of thousands" have been killed or maimed, the time has come to "change the culture of revenge with the culture of forgiveness." An Iraqi military spokesman said Sunday that militants fleeing a security crackdown in Baghdad have made areas outside the capital "breeding grounds for violence" after a week of deadly bombings and sectarian attacks. Iraqi security forces, backed by Sunni tribesmen, clashed Sunday with a united of al-Qaida fighters near the Syrian border, killing at least 21 members of the terrorist organization, police said. The fighting, near the border town of Qaim in Anbar province began after midnight and lasted several hours, said Col. Tariq Youssef, a police official in the city, 200 miles west of Baghdad. Iraq's government has endorsed plans to relocate thousands of Arabs who were moved to Kirkuk as part of Saddam Hussein's campaign to force ethnic Kurds out of the oil-rich city, in an effort to undo one of the former dictator's most enduring and hated policies.