21 including five US soldiers killed in Iraq

BAGHDAD, June 6 (agencies): Five American soldiers were killed in central Iraq Monday, the US military said in a statement. "Five US service members were killed Monday in central Iraq," the statement said, without giving further details. An interior ministry official and an Iraqi police officer said five rockets struck the US's sprawling Camp Victory base on Baghdad's outskirts, but Captain Dan Churchill, a US military spokesman, declined to give details on how the soldiers died. All American forces must withdraw from Iraq completely by the end of the year, according to the terms of a bilateral security pact.Meanwhile: Violence in Baghdad and central Iraq on Monday killed 16 people, including 12 struck by a car bomb driven by a suicide attacker in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit, officials said. The unrest came three days after attacks at a Tikrit mosque and hospital where victims were being treated killed 24, raising doubts over the capabilities of Iraqi security forces just months before all US forces must pull out. Monday's attack killed 12 people, including military intelligence Colonel Nuri Sabah al-Mashhadani and two other officers, and wounded 20 others, according to a police captain and an army captain, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.