Iraqi students shout anti-US slogans during a demonstration in Mosul on Tuesday. (AFP)

BAGHDAD, 22 December 2004 — An explosion ripped through a tent at a military base in Mosul where hundreds of US soldiers had just sat down to lunch yesterday, and officials said 24 people were killed and more than 60 wounded. A radical group, the Ansar Al-Sunnah Army, claimed responsibility for the deadliest attack on a US base in Iraq.

The dead included US military personnel, US contractors, foreign national contractors and Iraqi Army soldiers, said Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of Task Force Olympia in Mosul.

The attack came the same day that British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a surprise visit to Baghdad and described the ongoing violence in Iraq as a “battle between democracy and terror.”

Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, a spokesman for Task Force Olympia, told CNN that the toll was 24 dead. He added that more than 60 were wounded.

Officials could not break down the toll of dead or wounded among the groups. Reports also differed as to the cause of the blast at the camp, which is based outside the predominantly Sunni city about 355 kilometers (220 miles) north of Baghdad.

The base, also known as the Al-Ghizlani military camp, is used by both US troops and the interim Iraqi government’s security forces.

Although military officials initially said rockets or mortar rounds struck the camp, Hastings said it was still under investigation.

“We do not know if it was a mortar or a place explosive,” he said, describing it as a “single explosion.”

The force knocked soldiers off their feet and out of their seats as a fireball enveloped the top of the tent and shrapnel sprayed into the area.

Amid the screaming and thick smoke in the tent, soldiers turned their tables upside down, placed the wounded on them and gently carried them into the parking lot.

Scores of troops crammed into concrete bomb shelters, while others wandered around in a daze and collapsed.

A huge hole was blown in the roof of the tent, and puddles of blood, lunch trays and overturned tables and chairs covered the floor.

Earlier in the day, hundreds of students demonstrated in the center of the city, demanding that US troops cease breaking into homes and mosques there.

Also yesterday, Iraqi security forces repelled another attack by insurgents trying to seize a police station in the center of the city, the US military said.

On Sunday, insurgents detonated two roadside bombs and a car bomb targeting US forces in Mosul in three separate attacks. Other car bombs Sunday killed 67 people in the Shiite cities of Najaf and Kerbala.

Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, warned Monday that insurgents are trying to foment sectarian civil war as well as derail the Jan. 30 elections.

During his visit, Blair held talks with Allawi and Iraqi election officials, whom he called heroes for carrying out their work despite attacks. Three members of Iraq’s election commission were dragged from the car and killed this week in Baghdad.

“I said to them that I thought they were the heroes of the new Iraq that’s being created, because here are people who are risking their lives every day to make sure that the people of Iraq get a chance to decide their own destiny,” Blair said at a joint news conference with Allawi.

Blair, who has paid a political price for going to war in Iraq, defended the role of Britain’s 8,000 troops by referring to terrorism.

“If we defeat it here, we deal it a blow worldwide,” he said. “If Iraq is a stable and democratic country, that is good for the Middle East, and what is good for the Middle East, is actually good for the world, including Britain.”

Blair, whose trip to Iraq hadn’t been disclosed for security reasons, urged Iraqis to back next month’s elections.

“Whatever people’s feelings and beliefs about the removal of Saddam Hussein, and the wisdom of that, there surely is only one side to be on in what is now very clearly a battle between democracy and terror,” he said. Allawi said his government was committed to holding the elections as scheduled, despite calls for their postponement owing to the violence.

“We have always expected that the violence would increase as we approach the elections,” Allawi said. “We now are on the verge, for the first time in history, of having democracy in action in this country.”

In other violence yesterday, a US jet bombed a suspected insurgent target west of Baghdad. Hamdi Al-Alosi, a doctor in a hospital in the city of Hit, said four people were killed and seven injured in the strike.

Elsewhere, five American soldiers and an Iraqi civilian were wounded when the Humvee they were traveling in was hit by a car bomb near Hawija.

— With input from agencies