The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Baghdad

Insurgents killed two US soldiers and wounded eight others in separate attacks in northern Iraq, the military said early on Thursday.

The soldiers were killed on Wednesday. One soldier died and five others were wounded during combat operations near the oil refining city of Baiji, while another soldier was killed and three wounded in a land mine explosion in the northern province of Salaheddin. The overall toll of American military losses since the March 2003 invasion touched 3,833, according to Pentagon figures as on Wednesday.

In the northern city of Kirkuk and the nearby Sunni enclave of Howaija, three civilians - a university professor, an engineer and an energy official - were kidnapped, police reported.

According to the Aswat al-Iraq news agency, police have discovered countrywide bodies of 17 murder victims. Most were killed in Baghdad and the province of Diyala province north of the capital, the report said.

Washington report adds: The total cost, including debt servicing, of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could reach 2.4 trillion dollars by 2017, a non-partisan estimate found Wednesday, sparking fresh political rancor.

The report by the Congressional Budget Office flared tempers two days after President George W. Bush angered anti-war Democrats by requesting nearly 200 billion dollars more in emergency war funding.

The White House brushed off the estimate as speculation, but admitted that it did not know how much the war would cost.

For the first time, the CBO estimates included the huge costs of financing government borrowing used to pay for the wars. CBO Director Peter Orszag, said the "bottom line" figure of war spending would be 2.4 trillion dollars under most intense scenarios of military activity, if future costs were not offset by higher taxes or lower spending. "That is the highest number that is contained in our testimony, I don't know whether it is a worst case scenario," he told the House of Representatives Budget Committee. But White House press secretary Dana Perino dismissed the CBO figures as "a ton of speculation."

"It's a hypothetical that was created based on questions that Democrats in Congress that don't want us to be in the war asked the Congressional Budget Office to provide," she said.