BAGHDAD, 30 October 2006 — A bodyguard of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki was wounded and 19 others were killed in violence across the country, officials said yesterday. Maliki’s bodyguard was wounded when gunmen fired on a government car on Saturday in Baghdad, spokesman Ali Al-Dabbagh said yesterday.

Maliki was not present when the car, which was not armored, came under fire in the Rasheed district in southeast Baghdad. Dabbagh said it was clear that the three guards in the car had been deliberately targeted because it was a government vehicle. He said Iraqi forces intervened after the shooting.

US and Iraqi forces said they killed about 17 militants in a battle north of Baghdad early yesterday, after President George W. Bush promised Iraq’s prime minister more military aid in a bid to soothe recent friction.

“There are no strains in the relationship,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said after Bush and Maliki spoke for nearly an hour on Saturday after a week of public skirmishes involving US and Iraqi leaders that have raised questions over Bush’s exit strategy ahead of congressional elections on Nov. 7.

“The president is very happy ... with the way the prime minister is working,” Snow said. Maliki’s aides say he is furious at American pressure on him, and he and fellow Shiite Islamist leaders are concerned at what they see as a rapprochement between Washington and the long rebellious Sunni minority dominant under Saddam Hussein.

In a reminder of the sectarian violence, Interior Ministry sources said Baghdad police found 25 bodies, most tortured by death squads, in the past day. It was typical of the bloodshed that Bush has said is trying US patience.

He has vowed to stand by the Iraqi government — but only as long as it makes “tough decisions,” including clamping down on party militias loyal to rival political leaders. Some analysts see White House criticism of Iraqi leaders as preparing the ground for a US troop withdrawal plan, once voting is over.

“We are committed to the partnership our two countries and two governments have formed,” Bush and Maliki said in a joint statement after their talks. Bush said last week, however, he would not leave his troops in the cross-fire of a civil war.

Maliki’s office said Bush promised more help for the Iraqi forces. The prime minister told Reuters last week he could bring order in six months, half the time US generals estimate, if troops were better trained and armed. He blamed US policy for the turmoil and demanded more power to command his own forces. No American soldiers were hurt in the overnight battle near Balad, 80 kilometers north of the capital, the US military said in a statement which described airstrikes on militants preparing two separate ambushes for ground forces on the move.

So far in October, 99 US troops have died in Iraq, the bloodiest month in nearly two years that has raised the possibility of the monthly toll hitting 100, a week before voting in which polls suggest Bush’s Republicans could lose control of Congress.

Aircraft from the US-led Coalition attacked two groups of rebels, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns as they lay in ambush, the military said. On Saturday, three Iraqi soldiers were killed and four wounded near Balad, police said.

“Coalition aircraft thwarted two separate terrorist ambushes as ground forces moved toward their objective early yesterday morning near Balad,” the US military said in a statement, adding four rebels died in one attack and about 13 in the other.

In another development, a sports presenter at state television station Iraqiya was killed with her driver in Baghdad yesterday, an official at the station and police said, in the second murder of a sports reporter in five months.