Loud explosions boomed through central Baghdad early Friday, and sirens wailed in the compound housing the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition.

Smoke rose inside the compound, known as the "Green Zone."

A spokeswoman for the coalition, speaking on condition of anonymity, said officials were aware of explosions but did not know the location.

A coalition spokesman said he heard three explosions.

Insurgents last month fired mortars into the "Green Zone," a two-square-mile area that encompasses several buildings. If Friday's explosions also occurred inside, it would be the first time in several weeks that the seat of coalition power was hit.

The zone includes the Al Rasheed Hotel, used by military and coalition civilian employees until a rocket attack Oct. 26 that killed a U.S. colonel and wounded 18 other people. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was in the hotel at the time, but escaped injury.

Meanwhile, three suicide bombers in a furniture truck blew themselves up at the gates of a U.S. Army base Thursday, killing one soldier and wounding 14. It was the third suicide attack on American troops in Iraq this week.

Three wounded soldiers were evacuated from the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division west of Baghdad to a combat hospital and the other 11 wounded were treated and returned to duty, the U.S. military reported.

There were no U.S. fatalities in the previous two suicide attacks this week, indicating defenses erected at American facilities were paying off.

Three Iraqis were killed in the truck that exploded Thursday at Champion Base in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad.

The region around Ramadi and the nearby city of Fallujah is one of the most dangerous for coalition troops and sits in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where the majority of U.S. deaths in hostile action have occurred since President Bush (news - web sites) declared an end to major combat May 1.

On Tuesday, suicide bombers, one in a car and another on foot, blew themselves up at the gates of two U.S. military bases, wounding at least 61 American soldiers but failing to inflict deadly casualties on the scale of recent attacks in Iraq.

Most of the soldiers were slightly hurt by debris and flying glass, indicating the defenses around U.S. facilities — sand barriers, high cement walls and roadblocks leading to the entrances of bases — were having an effect.

At the same time, the suicide bombers' continued testing of U.S. defenses showed their tenacity; they seek to undermine American resolve by inflicting mass casualties with a single strike.

Also Thursday, the military reported one U.S. soldier drowned and another was missing after a patrol boat accident on the Tigris River in Baghdad.

"The soldiers were conducting routine patrols on the Tigris River when one of the soldiers fell overboard, and the other soldier jumped in to save him," the U.S. Central Command said in a statement.

The incident occurred Wednesday, and the drowned soldier from the Army's 1st Armored Division was found Thursday morning, the statement said.

U.S. soldiers said an Apache helicopter that crash-landed near the northern city of Mosul might have been hit by ground fire while making a low pass over the area.

A military spokesman had insisted that the helicopter was forced to crash land Wednesday because of mechanical failure and that the uninjured crew reported no ground fire. But a commander later said that he didn't know whether ground fire brought down the 101st Airborne Division helicopter.

The Apache came down near a highway south of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city. Troops guarding the site Thursday morning said the chopper had been hit by enemy fire. They asked not to be identified.

Brig. Gen. Frank Helmick later said the cause of the crash was unclear. "It could have been a mechanical failure but again, we are looking at all possibilities," he said.

Mosul was the site of the deadliest incident so far involving U.S. forces. On Nov. 17, two Black Hawk helicopters collided and crashed, killing 17 soldiers. Although military spokesmen initially insisted that the collision was the result of an accident, officers have since acknowledged that ground fire was the likely cause.

Also Thursday, Ghazi al-Talabani, director of the Northern Field Protection Force, which guards oil pipelines in northern Iraq, said an explosion set a pipeline ablaze, forcing officials to halt the flow.

He said the pipeline links the Beiji refinery in northern Iraq with the al-Doura refinery near Baghdad.

An official of the U.S.-led coalition, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a pipeline between Beiji and al-Doura was sabotaged late Tuesday or early Wednesday. It was unclear whether the official referred to the same incident.

In Samarra, another volatile city 60 miles north of Baghdad, two members of the U.S.-led paramilitary Civil Defense Corps were shot and killed overnight while on patrol, witnesses said Thursday. The attackers were not identified.

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