Rescuers dug seven bodies, all of them from the same family, from the rubble of their house today after an abortive suicide truck bomb attack on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad in which nine people died.
As American troops and Iraq's beleaguered Christian minority marked Christmas, there was no let-up in pressure on US and Iraqi forces from insurgents who bombed an Iraqi National Guard convoy in Mosul and assassinated a Baghdad medical professor.
A day after a visiting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told US troops the war could be won, American units in Mosul were again raiding homes in the hunt for suspects in the suicide bombing of a base mess tent that killed 22 people.
An official US army historian, Major Isaiah Wilson, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying poor planning for running Iraq after the invasion had put the United States "perhaps in peril of losing the war, even after supposedly winning it."
US troops were on high alert, four days after the Mosul bomb, the deadliest strike on Americans since they invaded.
"It would be a huge psychological boost for them to brag that they killed us at Christmas," said Colonel Ron Johnson, who commands the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit south of Baghdad.
Rescuers dug seven bodies from the rubble of a house in the capital's Mansur district, home to many embassies, 12 hours after massive fireball lit up the night sky late last night.
Police and witnesses said a fuel tanker appeared to have tried to ram its way to the Jordanian embassy but became stuck in a defensive chicane of concrete blocks and then exploded.
The embassy - which replaced a mission destroyed by a suicide bomber last year - was unscathed, but a house across the street collapsed.