A roadside bomb yesterday killed three civilians driving in a truck carrying vegetables at Ishaki, about 100km north of the capital, police said.

Two other civilians were killed by booby trap bomb as they drove behind an Iraqi army convoy.

On Thurdsday night, two Iraqis were killed in a similar attack near Baiji, an oil refinery 200 kilometers north of Baghdad, police said.

An Iraqi soldier and a rebel died in a clash at Dhuluiya, which erupted after an insurgent attack on an Iraqi army patrol, the military said.

The US military announced earlier that two American troops were killed in security operations on Thursday.

Earlier a US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb near Mosul while a second soldier attached to a Marine unit died during an operation south of Baghdad, the US military said yesterday.

The attack south of Mosul occurred early on Thursday morning during a convoy patrol. Another soldier was wounded and taken to hospital.

Three French nationals are being held by the US authorities in Iraq after being captured in last year's offensive against Islamic insurgents in Fallujah, Le Figaro newspaper reported Friday.

The newspaper named two of the men as Chekou Diakhabi, 19, and Peter Cherif, 22, both of them from the same neighbourhood of Paris where last week French intelligence agents made a series of arrests of suspected Islamic militants.

Meanwhile a female Italian journalist was kidnapped by armed men in central Baghdad near the city's main university on Friday, just minutes after she had called her office to say she was fine.

"The Italian journalist was kidnapped today around 2 pm (1100 GMT) in the district of al-Jadriya near Baghdad university," an Iraqi interior ministry official said.