Hours later, in a day filled with bloodshed, US troops shot two Iraqi policemen south of Baghdad after themselves being targeted by bombers.

The head of one of the leading tribes in Mosul said that he suspected that the US military had been fed false information about the house — which was flattened by a 500lb bomb — as part of a tribal dispute. Feuding clans often use false tip-offs to the Americans to settle old debts.

Even as the American military was saying sorry for the botched airstrike, troops patrolling the town of Latifiyah, south of Baghdad, were targeted by a roadside bomb. They opened fire, killing two Iraqi policemen manning a checkpoint near by, as well as two civilian bystanders. A fifth Iraqi suffered a heart attack and died, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The killings triggered yet more anger among a population that sees foreign troops as trigger-happy, frequently unaccountable and increasingly unwelcome.

“Why did these poor people have to die?” Doraid Abdul Khaliq, a taxi driver, asked. “Bombing, shooting and running a tank over cars have all become something normal.”

As if to emphasise his point, American soldiers opened fire on a car that failed to stop at a checkpoint north of Baghdad, causing the vehicle to swerve off the road and hit a telephone pole, killing both occupants. The military said that incident, too, was under investigation.

In Samarra, a city that the US Army claimed to have pacified in three months ago, the local police chief was shot dead when he got caught in the crossfire as American troops fought a gun battle with guerrillas.

Seven Ukrainian soldiers were killed while trying to defuse a stash of bombs found by Iraqi police to the southeast of Baghdad. A Kazakh soldier was also killed and 11 other troops wounded in the blast.

In Yusufiya, the small police force, a suicide car bomber rammed into a security checkpoint. Two civilians were killed in that incident, officials said.

In Baghdad an American soldier was killed when his patrol was hit by a roadside bomb. It brought America’s combat death toll to 1,064.

Iraqi and American officials insist that, despite the mounting violence, elections will go ahead on January 30. Sunni leaders, fearing that turmoil and intimidation in their region will lower turn-out, have called for a delay. The long-oppressed Shia majority insists that the polls go ahead as planned.

An attempt by Sunni leaders to breach the deadlock with their Shia counterparts went awry at the weekend when three senior Sunni officials were kidnapped near Latifiyah on their way to talks.

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