BAGHDAD, 7 June 2005 — The US military said yesterday it had smashed two bunkers in Iraq that served as insurgent lairs, while 15 Iraqis were killed in an unyielding spate of attacks.

US forces destroyed a former Republican Guard bunker system in the Yusifiyah area southwest of the capital on Thursday following a tip-off by local residents and surveillance of the site, said a military statement.

It said the bunker, located in an area that housed a large part of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s former military-industrial complex, was being used by insurgents to store ammunition.

“Coalition forces engaged the complex with five high-precision smart-bombs,” it said. “Secondary detonations emanating from inside the complex” continued for about six hours after the strike, the statement added.

On Sunday, US troops destroyed another bunker system built in an abandoned rock quarry in Karmah, near the former rebel bastion of Fallujah west of Baghdad, which had been found four days earlier.

About 300 pounds of plastic explosives were used to destroy the network and the weapons stored inside, the military said, adding that 12 weapons caches were also found within an eight-kilometer radius of the bunker.

At least 15 Iraqis and one US soldier have been killed in attacks since late Sunday, according to the US military and Iraqi security sources. An Iraqi civilian was killed and two wounded in a mortar attack against an Iraqi police checkpoint in the northern city of Mosul, police said. Five civilians, including two children, died Sunday in a similar attack west of Mosul, the US military said without giving details. Two Iraqi soldiers were killed in an attack on their checkpoint near Samarra, north of Baghdad, police said.

Nine Iraqi soldiers were wounded in suicide car bomb attacks in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, north of the capital, and Haswa to the south, said Iraqi security sources. Three members of the elite Iraqi commando force were wounded in a car bombing in the capital’s southwestern Al-Amil neighborhood, said a source at the Interior Ministry.

The US soldier died Sunday after his patrol was struck by a roadside bomb near the northern oil city of Kirkuk, the US military said.

The Interior Ministry had announced Sunday the arrest in the northern city of Mosul of two senior members of the organization of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Jordanian-born Zarqawi, who has $25 million bounty on his head and is Iraq’s most wanted man, is believed to have been wounded, but the severity of his injuries is not known.

Iraq yesterday offered a reward of $50,000 for information leading to the arrest of Abu Abdullah Al-Shafi, the alleged leader of Ansar Al-Sunnah, a group tied to the Al-Qaeda terror network. “Intelligence sources believe that foreign Arabs under the direct control of Al-Shafi actively recruit and train terrorists,” a government statement said.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi court that will try Saddam Hussein yesterday contradicted government statements that the deposed leader would go on trial within two months, saying there was no fixed timetable.

“There is no precise schedule for holding the trial, in accordance with the independence of the Iraqi Special Tribunal,” it said in a statement.