The New Nation - Internet Edition

AP, Baghdad

Sixty suspected al-Qaida in Iraq fighters hit national police facilities in a coordinated atack in Samarra, sparking two hours of fighting that saw three people killed and more than a dozen insurgents captured, police said Friday.

The masked atackers drove into the city at dusk Thursday in about 20 vehicles, including pickups with machine-guns, then split into small groups and assaulted four police checkpoints and a headquarters building, a Samarra police official said.

One policeman and two civilians - a woman and an 11-year-old girl - were killed in the fighting in the city 60 miles north of Baghdad, and nine others were injured including a police commando and three children. There were no details on insurgent casualties, but police arrested 14 suspects, the spokesman said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Lt Col. Michael Donnelly, a U.S. military spokesman in northern Iraq, said he had no details on the incident reported by Samarra police, but that an American patrol got into a firefight with gunmen in the city on Friday.

Reuters, adds: U.S. forces opened fire from helicopters during an overnight clash with Shi'ite militants in western Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding 20, police said on Friday.

They said the wounded included women and children who had been sleeping on rooftops to keep cool, although the dead were believed to be gunmen. Reuters Television pictures showed cars with their windows blown out after being strafed by gunfire .

Angry mourners, chanting and raising fists, took to the streets in the Shula district of the Iraqi capital, carrying wooden coffins of those killed in the clash."We demand the Iraqi government and parliament stop the Americans interfering in Shula," local tribal elder Sabeeh al-Sharji said.

"As you can see, civilians sleep on the roofs. These random atacks terrify women and children."

A spokesman for U.S. forces said they were checking into the incident but could not immediately provide information. With just weeks to go before U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker and military commander General David Petraeus are due to report to the U.S. Congress on progress in Iraq, U.S. intelligence agencies released a gloomy forecast of more violence and political stalemate.

"Levels of insurgent and sectarian violence will remain high and the Iraqi government will continue to struggle to achieve national-level political reconciliation and improved governance," declassified findings of the National Intelligence Estimate said.

Meanwhile, scores of Al-Qaeda fighters raided an Iraqi town on Thursday, clashing with rival militants and police after killing a tribal sheikh in fighting that left 23 people dead and 15 others kidnapped. Brigadier General Ali Dalayan, police chief of Diyala's provincial capital of Baquba, said more than 200 fighters from Al-Qaeda's Iraq affiliate atacked a mosque and the homes of tribal Sunni sheikhs in the town of Kanan. "The first atack was against a mosque," he told AFP. "They blew up the mosque, then they bombed houses crowded with family members."

Three houses were atacked, including those of two sheikhs who support Iraqi police and US troops in their fight against Al-Qaeda, he said.

"Sheikh Yunis al-Tae was killed in the atack" along with an unknown number of his sons in one of the homes, Dalayan said.

Police countered with the support of gunmen from the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution, a Sunni insurgent group once allied with Al-Qaeda but now one of its fiercest rivals.

He was not immediately able to say how many people died in the raids and how many in the ensuing gunbatle. At least one police officer was among the dead.

Dalayan said police had chased the atackers but had had a "difficult time as they planted roadside bombs around the town before escaping."

"We have arrested 22 Al-Qaeda suspects," he said. They were detained south of Kanan, 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Baghdad, in an area known to be a stronghold of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.