One soldier was killed and three injured as they detonated unexploded ammunition in Baghdad, while two soldiers were injured separately when assailants attacked their transport truck.

The soldiers destroying the ammunition, belonging to the US Army V Corps, were rushed to a field hospital for medical attention after the Saturday accident.

Also Saturday two US soldiers were injured when assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at their transport truck near the town of Habbaniyah.

The injuries were not life threatening, the Central Command statement from Doha read.

In a separate Saturday incident, assailants also armed with a rocket-propelled grenade destroyed a US Army tanker truck at a Baghdad fuel depot. There were no US or civilian casualties, and US Marines detained four Iraqis for questioning, the statement added.

On Tuesday two US marines were killed when unexploded ordnance they were handling detonated. And on Wednesday nine Iraqi children were killed and seven wounded when a rocket they were playing with exploded in southern Iraq.

In Washington, Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss tried to make sense of the chaos in Iraq.

"These people have lived under an iron-fisted ruler in Saddam Hussein. They have not been allowed any freedoms whatsoever," Chambliss said on NBC's 'Meet the Press' program.

"And all of a sudden now, they are free and they're very emotional, and they're doing things that are probably not characteristic of the Iraqi people," he said.

Democratic Representative Jane Harman told NBC the US-led force in Iraq were not prepared to protect the peace.

"As the mother of a teenage daughter, I know if you don't set limits around children, they'll test you," she said. "And we should have predicted that there would be the looting, or at least more looting than we foresaw."

Both seemed to realize that considerably more US resources would be needed in Iraq to secure peace.

US administrator for Iraq Paul Bremer "is committed to doing the job that's necessary to restore the peace," Chambliss said. "If it means more troops, he's going to have more troops there. He's been realistic. He said . . . it's going to take months, maybe years."

Harman said Bremer "could do this job if we commit the resources. If we don't, he'll fail."

In February Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki said at least some 200,000 troops would be needed to maintain peace in a post-Saddam Iraq. He was dismissed publicly twice by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Meanwhile the Central Command issued a lengthy statement detailing efforts to maintain peace.

The statement mentions everything from minor armed clashes with anti-US forces to activities during joint patrols with Iraqi police.

The US-led forces "continue to aggressively patrol to make Iraq safer for all Iraqis by eliminating smuggling and trade in weapons and explosives," the statement read.

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