BAGHDAD, 18 June 2007 — Assailants killed at least eight people in Iraq yesterday, while a Sunni mosque south of the capital was bombed in the latest in a spate of tit-for-tat attacks on religious sites, security officials said.

A suicide bomber blew up a vehicle against the Sunni Al-Anwar mosque in the town of Al-Haswa, 60 kilometers (35 miles) south of Baghdad, police Lt. Hamza Al-Shammari said.

The attack wounded six people, including four of the mosque’s guards. It was the latest in a string of attacks against Sunni religious sites since the bombing of the Shiite Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad, on Wednesday.

A US military convoy carrying Iraqi police recruits came under a “stationary car bomb and small arms fire attack” west of the northern oil refinery town of Baiji, the military said. “Initial reports indicate three local nationals were killed in the attack,” it added.

Lt. Hussein Al-Hajjam of Baiji police gave a different account of the attack. He said a suicide bomber blew himself up as the convoy passed, killing two police recruits and wounding seven others.

In the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, a car bomb exploded near an office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the Kurdish party of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, killing two security guards, police and medics said. “The bombers left an explosives-laden car on the road near the office in east Kirkuk’s Al-Askari neighborhood and fled,” said Capt. Sharzad Mahmud of Kirkuk police.

Insurgents have set off a series of car bombs against Kurdish targets in and around Kirkuk as an end-of-year deadline looms for the holding of a referendum on longstanding Kurdish claims for the ethnically divided city’s incorporation into their northern autonomous region.

In the restive city of Baquba, just north of the capital, two people were killed in shootings, police Capt. Zaid Al-Ameri said.

On a visit to Baghdad on Saturday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged that security had deteriorated in Diyala province around Baquba, even as US and Iraqi forces made progress in Anbar province west of the capital.

In Tikrit, gunmen killed police Captain Mazin Al-Juburi, a security source said. Newspaper editor Filaih Wadai Mijthab, who was kidnapped by gunmen last week, was found dead in a Baghdad mortuary, the journalists’ union said.

Mijthab, the managing editor of the state-run Al-Sabah daily, had been abducted on Wednesday from the Habibiyah neighborhood, near the east Baghdad Shiite militia bastion of Sadr City. The US military also announced that 10 militants had been killed in separate raids.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki assured Turkey yesterday that his government wanted to halt the operations of Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq.

During a meeting with Turkey’s envoy to Baghdad, Derya Kanbay, Maliki said Iraq “was concerned about the operations of PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) that result in the killing of innocent victims.” “We are keen to prevent PKK from carrying out activities in Iraq,” a statement from Maliki’s office quoted him as saying.

Kanbay met Maliki and delivered a letter from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assuring Baghdad of Ankara’s support in achieving Iraqi stability and boosting relations.

In another development, coalition commander Gen. David Petraeus suggested yesterday that US troops could be needed in Iraq for a decade to battle insurgents. Speaking on Fox News, the US general said there was broad recognition that Iraq’s daunting challenges would not be resolved “in a year or even two years.”

“In fact, typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years,” he said in response to a question about whether US forces could face a Korea-style deployment in Iraq for decades.