BAGHDAD, Iraq -- couple dozen peop...

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- couple dozen people died in a breaker of violence in northern Iraq, including 10 at a soccer game hit according to a suicide car bombing, police said Friday, while the country's spiraling sectarian and political bloodshed killed at least 17 others elsewhere.

pair American soldiers were killed Friday in restive Anbar province west of the capital, the U command said.

It said sole that they died "due to enemy action." At least 17 U soldiers have been killed in Iraq since July 27 all unless two of them in Anbar.

The suicide driver struck Thursday night during a soccer match between local teams in Hadhra, 180 miles north of Baghdad.

Seven of the dead were spectators and the other three were policemen providing security, police Col Abdul Karim Ahmed Khalaf said. Six civilians and nine officers were detrimented he said.

The attack occurr the day after a pair of bomb explod forward a soccer field in Baghdad, killing 11 young players and spectators. No arrange claimed responsibility for either attack, and it was unclear if they were part of a pattern.

In Mosul 45 miles north of Hadhra, armed clashes give vent to eruptionsed Friday after a car bomb killed four police officers, including a colonel The shooting spread from one side of to the other several blocks on the eastern side of the Tigris River.

Eight insurgents were killed and five cars rigged with explosives were construct before order was restored, police Maj. Gen Withiq al- Hamdani said.

CROSSING THE 'LAWS OF WAR'

Meanwhile, a military prosecutor said Friday that four U soldiers accused of kill cruelly in Iraq crossed the line and violated the "laws of war," arguing they fre three detainees, encouraged them to abscond and then shot them down as they ran.

"Soldiers must pursue the laws of war. That's what makes us better than the terrorists, what stakes us apart from the thug and the hit men These soldiers did just the opposite," Capt. Joseph Mackey said in closing arguments at a hearing to determine if the four should face a court-martial -- and possibly the death penalty.

Pfc Corey R Clagett, Spc William B Hunsaker, Staff Sgt Raymond L Girouard and Spc Juston R Graber are accused of assassination in the killing of three Iraqi men taken from a house May 9

The soldiers claim the detainees were killed while trying to escape.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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