Some 21 people were killed in violence across Iraq yesterday including a pregnant woman and three of her children who were savagely gunned down in the north of Iraq.

The US military also reported that two powerful roadside bombs had killed four soldiers Sunday as December is on track to be one of the deadliest months for US soldiers so far this year.

Armed men burst into the home of a pregnant Shia woman of the Turkmen ethnic group and sprayed her and her children with bullets in the town of Salaja, 75km south of Kirkuk, Iraq's northern oil city.

Three of her children, aged

between five and 13, were killed while two other daughters survived the fusillade.

Police could give no motive for the attack, but noted that her husband was a Kurd and a member of the old army.

The area around Kirkuk, a fragile mix of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, both Sunni and Shia, experiences occasional flare-ups in sectarian violence driven by Sunni militant groups.

Nine people were shot dead in the restive province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, including three policeman, in a series of incidents, police said.

Just north of Baghdad, in the town of Dujail, gunmen hijacked a

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minibus carrying five primary school teachers on their way to work and kidnapped them, said police at the joint coordination centre in Tikrit.

Once again, police could not comment on the motive, but predominantly Shia Dujail has come under increasing pressure from the overwhelmingly Sunni countryside since Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced to death for crimes against humanity against the people of Dujail in the early 1980s.

Further kidnappings took place in central Baghdad, when gunmen in four pickup trucks pulled up at the Istithmar (Investment) bank and seized four employees who were about to enter the bank with money.

In south Baghdad, four mortar rounds slammed into the often targeted Abu Chir neighbourhood, killing four people and wounding 11, a defence ministry official said.

A suicide bomber blew up his vehicle against an Iraqi police commando base in the southern Dura district, killing a policeman and wounding five others, a security official said.

Dura has long been gripped by sectarian and insurgent violence and over the past six months it has been subject to repeated raids and operations by US and Iraqi forces in an effort to pacify it.

In northwest Baghdad, another

faultline in the capital's sectarian dirty war, a car bomb in a garage in the al-Iskan neighbourhood exploded as a police commando patrol passed.

The blast near the private al-Maamun university killed a bystander and wounded four others, including two police commandos.

Across town near central Baghdad's Mustansiriyah university, another bomb went off killing a student and wounding eight others, according to a medic in the nearby al-Kindi hospital where they were treated.

He said that another civilian was shot dead by gunmen in the nearby Fadhel neighbourhood, a frequent site of clashes between Shia militias and Sunni insurgents.

One US soldier was killed early Sunday by a roadside bomb west of Baghdad, while three others were killed by another bomb that night in the northern part of the city.

Roadside bombs remain the main killer of US troops and the latest casualties bring the number of US dead in December to 48 -which at the beginning of the year would have been the toll for an entire month.

Since March 2003, 2,931 US servicemen have died in Iraq, according to an AFP count compiled from Pentagon sources.