A huge explosion rocked central Baghdad on Wednesday night, and the U.S. military said it was a rebel rocket-propelled grenade that narrowly missed the Sheraton Ishtar Hotel.

Iraqi police officers inspect a minibus damaged in a blast after a roadside explosive device went off killing two and wounding two people in central Baghdad Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2003. [AP]

"We can confirm that an RPG was fired at the Sheraton but missed," Capt. Jason Beck of the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division, the unit that controls Baghdad, told The Associated Press.

"The other loud explosion are effects from Operation Iron Grip. We are firing on targets in the general area," he said.

At the Sheraton, guests called by satellite telephone, said they were fine, and a hotel worker in the hotel lobby said the upper floors had been checked and it had not been hit. "That wasn't our hotel," he said.

A firefight followed the blast, which occurred at about 8:15 p.m. local time and appeared to come from some distance behind the heavily barricaded hotel, a haven for Westerners on Abu Nawas Street, on the east bank of the Tigris River.

The 1st Armored Division unleashed a barrage farther from central Baghdad before dawn Wednesday and said it was aimed at anti-American insurgents. Troops raided homes and arrested a Sunni sheik said to be close to Iraq's most wanted man. A string of separate bombings killed six civilians and three American soldiers.

The military would not say what it was targeting in Baghdad, but Maj. John Frisbie of the 1st Armored Division indicated troops were still acting on information gleaned from the Dec. 13 capture of Saddam Hussein, as well as information from residents.

"We continue to gain intelligence from the neighborhoods here and the residents of Baghdad who are seemingly frustrated at these continued (rebel) attacks," Frisbie said.

Military commanders said the number of daily attacks on U.S. troops had slowed in recent weeks, even before Saddam's capture — but north of Baghdad, three soldiers were killed Wednesday as they traveled in a convoy near Samarra.

In the northern city of Irbil, a car bomb exploded in front of the Kurdish Interior Ministry, killing at least five people, hospital officials said. About 50 people were injured.

Irbil also houses the Kurdish parliament. Under U.S.-led aerial protection, Iraqi Kurds, ethnically distinct from the majority Arabs, have ruled an autonomous Switzerland-sized stretch of northern Iraq since the end of the Gulf War more than a decade ago.

Kircout Ali, a civilian who was at the scene of the blast in Irbil, said the bomb exploded at barricades in front of the Interior Ministry. At least four passengers in a car beside the booby-trapped car were killed, Ali said.

At a news briefing, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said only two people died in Irbil, including the bomber and a civilian, and said the blast brought down the protective wall in front of the building.

Kimmitt also said two Iraqi police were killed in an attack in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, and that two suspected assailants were detained.

Also Wednesday, a minibus detonated a roadside bomb in a Baghdad traffic tunnel, killing two people and wounding two others, hospital officials said. The bomb exploded in the Shurta tunnel around noon, when roads fill as residents go home for lunch.

U.S. forces on Tuesday night launched a new offensive in Baghdad, Operation Iron Grip, targeting an area that had been used to fire mortars at troops. Kimmitt said the U.S. bombardment consisted of "targeted attacks, very precise."

He said the operation was a show of force as the military steps up security against threats of attacks over the Christmas holiday by Baghdad's 14 identified guerrilla cells.

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