Five young girls were among six Iraqis killed by US forces yesterday after troops used tanks and machine guns to attack what they said was a house occupied by insurgents.

Fighting broke out in the city of Ramadi, considered a stronghold of the anti-US insurgency, after a US patrol discovered a roadside bomb in the Hamaniyah section of the city.

The military said that as the patrol worked to remove the bomb, two insurgents opened fire on them from the nearby house. The soldiers fired back with tanks and machine guns. When they later entered the house they found the bodies of the young girls. A sixth female was apparently also wounded but declined treatment.

Soldiers found the body of one man, presumed to have been one of two suspected insurgents running into the house. A statement from the US military said the body of the other man seen running into the house may have been removed by other fighters. "In a very tragic way, today reminds us that insurgents' actions throughout Iraq are felt by all," said the military spokesman Lt Col Bryan Salas. "Efforts are under way to offer available assistance to surviving family members."

The news comes after US government documents revealed that hundreds of private contractors have died in Iraq since the start of the occupation, with 10 British employees killed in the past two months.

US labour department officials have acknowledged that, since March 2003, 662 claims for compensation have been received from the relatives of contractors who have died working in Iraq.

While the documents, obtained during an investigation by Channel 4 News, provide an incomplete figure it does shed light on the largely unpublicised hazards facing those working in the industry. Some 48,000 private contractors work in Iraq, US officials say, double the number in 2005. Some are involved in reconstruction and logistical support, while others are engaged in security and escort work.

The death toll among Britons working in this industry has been particularly high in the past two months, surpassing that of British soldiers who have died during this period. Since 29 September, 10 British security contractors have died. A single attack caused a third of these losses. A roadside bomb hit a convoy operated by the security firm Erinys 20 miles east of Baghdad on 18 October. The British contractors Carl Ledden, 41; Noah Stephenson, 29, and Fraser Burnett were killed in the blast.

In an e-mail to a relativeweeks before his death, Mr Ledden, who worked protecting the US military, said he was unhappy about repeatedly travelling along the same route. "We are setting patterns here good-style and I wouldn't be surprised if we get hit," he wrote."

Erinys, which has contracts in Iraq protecting the American military, said: " Unfortunately, we are not in a position to comment whilst the incident is subject to a formal investigation, which is routine policy for all incidents involving our personnel."

Nick Paton Walsh's report will be shown at 7pm tonight on Channel 4 News

UNDER Saddam Hussein, if you were not a member of the Baath party, you wouldn't get rations, you'd be forbidden to carry on studying, you wouldn't be on the earth but in the sea.

I was invited to join the party in 1976, when I was doing my compulsory military service after earning my first degree at Mosul University. The colonel in control of my camp wanted to sit for an examination, and he asked me to join the party and translate the Oxford Companion to Military History into Arabic for him.

I'm very ambitious. I wanted to carry on with my studies. And so I joined the party, and when I finished my military service I was appointed to the university. They never appoint anyone unless you're a party member, it doesn't matter if you're Plato or Aristotle.

In 1982, when Iraq and Iran were at war, they asked me if I wanted a promotion within the party. To get this, I would have to go with some other comrades and execute deserters from the war. I told them I was not an executioner.

They put me in prison. Through family contacts, I got out after one month. They expelled me from teaching and transferred me to clerical work.

I tried to escape Iraq for Turkey in 1995. But the Kurds in northern Iraq demanded money I didn't have, and I decided to go back to Mosul, where I had a 300-meter plot of land given to me by Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein gave everybody a plot of land. He was the most generous president, but also the most severe. He was a god, and gods are arbitrary.

In Mosul, men in a black Cadillac stopped me, blindfolded me and drove me to Baghdad, to Hakmiya Prison. After three months of solitary confinement, torture and electric shocks, I was accused of spying for Turkey. When I went in, my weight was 242 pounds. I came out only 121 pounds. I was divided in half by the torture.

After a year in prison, I came home. We were impoverished. My wife and children were living with her father in Karbala -- they are Shiites -- and my salary wasn't even enough for transportation to visit them. After a long time, I was reappointed to a university near there. I had been there for three months when the Americans came.

Nobody in Karbala dared to work as a translator for the American soldiers, so I was pushed into the first ranks, translating between the military commanders and the governor every day on TV. I found myself riding a rocket of fame and prestige, but no money. Just $20 a week, and a stigma in the eyes of others.

I translated conferences and debates with the Karbala city council. I even translated for L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, when he came. Before he arrived, the colonel I worked for told me, ''Waddah, don't tell anybody he's coming.'' They trusted me, and I was worthy of their trust.

I tried to solve problems. Once, when students had a sit-in demonstration against the Americans, I told them: ''Be quiet, be careful in your way of dealing with them. If you're impolite, suppose they are impolite, too -- you could be killed.''

Many times when I went to my father-in-law's house I was shot at from afar. Among the Shiites there are many hard-liners who support Iran and hate America. They didn't know that by marriage, I'm a Shiite like them. They said, this guy's a Sunni, serving the Americans.

The Americans gave me a pistol to defend myself. It was a war spoil, an Iraqi intelligence-style pistol. But it created some troubles between me and the American in charge of intelligence. One day he told me, ''Waddah, give me the card for the weapon,'' the identity card allowing me to carry the weapon. I told him I didn't have it. I didn't trust him very much. He was young, proud and haughty. He frisked me, searching for the card, right in front of the president of the university, and he found the card in my pocket. He said, ''You lied to me?''

I decided to quit working for the Americans. Not long after this, a child relative of mine was kidnapped on her way home from school. I sold my wife's gold, and I sold the plot of land Saddam Hussein gave me, for the ransom. Every one of my friends was looking for her. Finally the kidnappers telephoned my brother, he gave them $50,000, and she was released. This is what the insurgents do to finance their terror.

HISTORY is an idea to you; to us it is our life. I'm a typical Iraqi. I love my country. I love my food, my way of life, I love the carpets, the mud of the Euphrates, Iraqi poetry, everything: this is my culture. If I feel proud, I recite my poets, and the rhythm comes back, and no other rhythm can supersede or remove it.

What made Saddam Hussein powerful? Information. Whenever a person checked into a hotel, a paper with his full name and a copy of his passport was given to the security quarters. Iraq was a castle; a bird could not go in without being checked. If you caused offense, you could be put in prison for good. If you were lucky you would be tried one day; if not, then we have a word in Arabic that means you rot, as food rots.

America did well to liberate Iraq. But Iraqis were used to tyranny and afraid of freedom. The Americans entered Iraq without a psychological program for dealing with this fact. Iraqis had been programmed according to another system of thought and feeling. America should have considered that.

Waddah Ali is a poet, translator and university lecturer.

WHEN I was a student, we read many books about Western culture, democracy and the Greek philosophers. We saw movies set in America, where people were able to speak their minds, and we figured that democracy would be the salvation for us and our country.

Our dreams were romantic and rosy. The bitterness and ugliness of the reality we have faced since was nothing we could have imagined.

In Saddam Hussein's time, in order to be accepted you had to tell the government that you were a Baathist; you had to tell people in your social environment that you were religious; and in fact you had to be somewhere in the middle.

I was a moderate liberal. In my imaginary republic, there was space for everybody -- Baathists, socialists, liberals -- as long as you didn't hurt people or persecute them or impose your style of thinking or living on others.

When the Americans invaded, I was ready to shake hands with the devil himself to remove Saddam Hussein from power. I didn't think the Americans would be able to give us liberty or democracy, but I thought they would give us the space to build that imaginary republic. I didn't go to work for the Americans, but I published articles in a newspaper they established in Mosul. It was called New Hope. It told the people what the American forces were doing day by day in Mosul, and there was space where Iraqis could write opinions.

I wrote nine articles for that newspaper. One of them won a competition for the best essay on democracy and liberty in Iraq. It was a big competition, and I won. What I said, simply, was that liberty is just like your own spirit, your own soul: nobody can give it to you, but anybody can take it away from you. My photo appeared in the paper with the article.

I was a lecturer at an institute, and I started receiving threats from my students -- directly, face to face: ''You deserve to die.'' And my boss said, ''You've been a traitor to your religion and your country.'' Insurgents slid threatening letters under my door. My mother was terrified. I'm her only son.

The terrorists do not necessarily attack you personally. They attack sisters, kidnap sons, mothers. We are in a war against dishonorable enemies. The only thing that I had, the only weapon to defend myself, was my pen and my words, but the solution for them was not discussion, not disagreeing with me, but shooting me.

They shot dead a salesman who came to our door, because they mistook him for me. We sold the house and went to live with my sister.

Some time later, a friend offered me a job with an Iraqi organization called Development and Democratic Dialogue. Three or four days after I started working there, my friend was kidnapped while giving a lecture at a university. Before he died I'd told him, ''Don't give a lecture in the same place twice.'' But that's what he did. We were like soldiers without weapons: you go and give lectures, but you don't know what's going to happen to you when the lecture is finished.

I think the Americans, as we Iraqis understand them, are two entities. There's the Army in Iraq and the politicians in Washington. The American policy people wanted to give us democracy and liberty the same way you give me a shirt, so I can wear it right away. But the general opinion in my country, especially among extremists, is that America went into Iraq only for one reason: to terminate Islam and Muslims. Those who aren't so extreme say that America invaded Iraq only to steal the oil.

The American Army, on the other hand, we know for sure is not an abstract entity; it is a bunch of people, every one of them different from the others. They are under very, very intense pressure. People hate them, people are attacking them, and of course this pressure can lead to many mistakes. They destroyed everything and thought they could rebuild from scratch. Maybe this could have worked if people loved Americans or understood what they were doing. But people already hated America.

America should have removed Saddam Hussein and the closest circle around him and appointed a strong government right away. It would have been another dictatorship, but a different kind. It could have imposed martial law, then done the job that the Americans were not able to do, which was to cut power away from the old system by removing those people who might become terrorists in the future.

After four to eight years, we could have had an election, and the new government could have started working on the basis of the new Constitution. Then Iraqi society could have taken baby steps down the long road to democracy and liberty. As it was, the Iraqi people, who had no experience with civilian government or democratic systems, misused these things.

Now the problems of Iraq will not be solved without a long and very bloody civil war. The fragments that will emerge should practice democracy by choosing their own leaders, away from the influence of the Americans -- even if those leaders are terrorists. But the people will not enjoy the democracy and liberty that was already given to them, because they refused it.

Omar Ghanim Fathi is an essayist and college lecturer.

Iraq needs a new government to begin a process of national reconciliation leading to the withdrawal of foreign troops, because the US, Britain and Iraqi leaders are in a "state of denial" about their failed policy, a former UN envoy to the country says.

"There is a refusal to accept that the so-called process is not working. It collapsed a long time ago. They should sit down and put something else up. What we need is a serious attempt at national reconciliation that has never taken place," said Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian diplomat who put together the first blueprint for the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Mr Brahimi, who has testified to the Iraq Study Group led by the former US secretary of state James Baker, emphasised that he was speaking in his personal capacity.

"On the departure of troops, frankly in the UK and US most of the time people are talking about solving the US/UK problem, not solving the Iraqi problem," he said. In the context of a national reconciliation programme, a temporary increase in troops may prove necessary, he said, but "part of that process will have to be a solemn, unequivocal, clear commitment to withdrawal and that there will be no more military bases in Iraq. Whether withdrawal takes place in six to eight months, or all at once, that would be part of the big negotiations."

He added that "what is very, very disturbing is that the militias killing Iraqis are actually in the government. In other words part of the government is part of the problem." He also warned that allowing Iraq to break up into three parts, as advocated by some politicians and commentators in the US and Britain, would produce "chaos, first inside Iraq, and then all over the region".

Mr Brahimi said the US and the UK should consult Iran and Syria on ending the violence in Iraq, but he warned that these two states alone do not hold a "miracle solution". All of Iraq's neighbours, including Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, as well as the Arab League, should be involved in a negotiated solution, he said.

Asked whether the "window of opportunity" had already closed for Iraq, Mr Brahimi replied: "It's never totally closed. The thing is to know how to reopen it, but after how many thousands more are dead?"

At least 101 Iraqis died in the country's unending sectarian slaughter Wednesday, and the U.N. reported that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest monthly toll of the war and one that is sure to be eclipsed when November's dead are counted.

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq also said citizens were fleeing the country at a pace of 100,000 each month, and that at least 1.6 million Iraqis have left since the war began in March 2003.

Life for Iraqis, especially in Baghdad and cities and towns in the center of the country, has become increasingly untenable. Many schools failed to open at all in September, and professionals — especially professors, physicians, politicians and journalists — are falling to sectarian killers at a stunning pace.

Lynchings have been reported as Sunnis and Shiites conduct a merciless campaign of revenge killings. Some Shiite residents in the north Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah claim that militiamen and death squads are holding Sunni captives in warehouses, then slaughtering them at the funerals of Shiites killed in the tit-for-tat murders.

Wednesday's death count included 76 bodies found dumped in four cities, 59 of them in Baghdad alone, according to police, who said at least 25 people had been gunned down.

The U.N. figure for the number of killings in October was more than three times the 1,216 tabulated by The Associated Press and nearly 850 more than the 2,867 U.S. service members who have died during the war.

The U.N. said its figures for civilian deaths were based on reports from the Iraqi Health Ministry, the country's hospitals and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad. The previous monthly record was 3,590 for July.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh called the U.N. report "inaccurate and exaggerated" because it was not based on official government reports.

Asked in a telephone interview if any such report existed, al-Dabbagh told the AP that one "was not available yet but it would be published later."

The U.N. report said Iraq's heavily armed and increasingly brutal Shiite militias were gaining strength and influence and that torture was rampant, despite the Iraqi government's vow to reduce human rights abuses.

"Hundreds of bodies continued to appear in different areas of Baghdad — handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture and execution-style killing," said the report by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, or UNAMI. "Many witnesses reported that perpetrators wear militia attire and even police or army uniforms."

The two primary militias in Iraq are the military wings of the country's strongest Shiite political groups on which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is heavily dependent. He has repeatedly rejected U.S. demands that he disband the heavily armed groups, especially the Mahdi Army of radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

"I think the type of violence is different in the past few months," Gianni Magazzeni, the UNAMI chief in Baghdad, told a news conference. "There was a great increase in sectarian violence in activities by terrorists and insurgents, but also by militias and criminal gangs."

He noted that religious clashes have been common since Sunni Arab insurgents bombed a major Shiite shrine on Feb. 22 in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

UNAMI's Human Rights Office continued to receive reports that Iraqi police and security forces have either been infiltrated by or act in collusion with militias, the report said.

It said that while sectarian violence is the main cause of the civilian killings, Iraqis also continue to be the victims of terrorist acts, roadside bombs and drive-by shootings, while some have been caught in the cross fire between rival gangs.

Access to the U.N. news conference was blocked for many because the main entrance to the fortified Green Zone in central Baghdad was closed as U.S. forces checked for a bomb in the area, a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

On Wednesday, assassins killed a bodyguard of Iraq's parliament speaker one day after a bomb exploded in the hot-tempered politician's motorcade as it drove into a parking lot inside the Green Zone.

The bomb attack on the motorcade of Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a hard-line Sunni Arab nationalist reviled by many Shiites, was a major security breach in the heavily guarded compound that houses the U.S. and British embassies and the Iraqi government. It was also the fourth assassination attempt against a high-ranking Iraqi government official in recent days.

Last summer, Shiite and Kurdish parties organized an unsuccessful bid to oust al-Mashhadani as parliament speaker after he called the U.S. occupation of Iraq "the work of butchers."

On Nov. 1, al-Mashhadani had to be physically restrained from attacking a Sunni lawmaker. The speaker had been holding a nationally televised news conference when he lashed out at the legislator, Abdel-Karim al-Samarie, for alleged corruption and failure to attend sessions. He called him a "dog" — a deep insult in Iraq and other Arab societies.

Violence also continued against Iraq's journalists Wednesday, when gunmen sprayed Raad Jaafar Hamadi with bullets as he drove his car in the capital's Washash neighborhood, said police 1st Lt. Maitham Abdul-Razaq. Hamadi worked for the state-run al-Sabah newspaper.

At least 92 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led war began, according to an AP count, based on statistics kept by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Thirty-six other media employees, including drivers, interpreters and guards, have been killed — all of them Iraqi except for one Lebanese.

The U.S. military reported the deaths of two U.S. soldiers on Tuesday. One was killed by a roadside bomb and the other died from non-combat causes. So far this month, 49 American service members have been killed or died.

ANDY CARD began his political ascent as George H. W. Bush’s driver and carried forward a valet’s mind-set into the job of White House chief of staff. Less a power broker than a punching bag, Card made it his mission to venture before the cameras to swallow blame for administration follies, like its catatonic response to Hurricane Katrina. And behind closed doors, his role was even more humiliating. The former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill recalled George W. Bush interrupting a top-level meeting to issue Card an extremely urgent request: “You’re the chief of staff. You think you’re up to getting us some cheeseburgers?”

It is startling, therefore, to read Bob Woodward’s portrayal of Card as the conscience of the Bush administration. In his telling, Card orchestrated a brave but doomed campaign to oust Donald Rumsfeld and change course in Iraq. Where other advisers evaded responsibility, Card constantly told the president, “You should not be afraid to change me.” Card occupies considerable space in “State of Denial” and has dominated coverage of it. Such an unconventional portrait inevitably provokes a cynical explanation: that Woodward, amanuensis to the Washington stars, has once again uncritically transcribed someone’s self-serving version of events.

Cynicism, however, trivializes the significance of Card’s confessions. To have so many of the president’s fiercest loyalists, like Card, testify to his incompetence — and with the ultimate Establishment journalist’s tape recorder running — is itself a turning point. With two years to go, Woodward has written the Bush administration’s version of “The Final Days.”

He has retroactively bundled his books on the Bush White House into a trilogy. “State of Denial,” the jacket tells us, is Part 3 of his “Bush at War” cycle. This is obvious sleight of hand. Woodward’s first book provided so favorable a treatment of the administration that the Republican National Committee recommended it on its Web site. But “State of Denial” isn’t a continuation of his previous work as much as a repudiation — the installment in which he takes a mulligan and attempts to correct for past obsequiousness.

Your standard volume of Woodward reportage could be titled “Everything That Happened Since My Last Book.” But “State of Denial” deviates from this model. It doesn’t even begin where his last Bush book, “Plan of Attack,” left off — in the euphoric early days of the Iraq war. Instead, Woodward retraces his reportorial steps back to the moment George W. Bush first considered running for president, when his father called the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, down to Austin to provide his boy a foreign policy tutorial. And Bandar initiates the book’s flood of unflattering details. According to him, Bush exclaimed, “I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy.” (Domestic foreign policy was another matter.)

Where Bush appeared resolute in the first two installments of Woodward’s trilogy, he now comes across as a “Saturday Night Live” version of himself. He cracks fart jokes with Karl Rove and conspires to play a prank on the current Federal Reserve chairman. Woodward argues that this Andover grad still views himself as a cheerleader, bucking up the polity even if his rosy exhortations come at the cost of the truth. (When a C.I.A. briefer informs the president of the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, Bush dismisses the messenger from Langley as “Baghdad Bob,” a reference to Saddam Hussein’s old spokesman.) And if the president can’t face the facts, it may have something to do with his insecurities. According to Woodward, the president’s legs anxiously jiggle under the table in meetings. He also suggests, as others have, that our adventure in Iraq had less to do with the promotion of democracy and more to do with the president’s relationship with his father. Bush wanted to outdo his dad by taking down the tyrant his old man had left standing.

But the president is too passive a player to be Woodward’s central villain. Besides, Donald Rumsfeld fills that role far too perfectly. He comes across as utterly contemptuous of other human beings. When Condoleezza Rice makes important presentations to the president, Rumsfeld ostentatiously fails to pay attention — and then fails to return her calls afterward. What’s worse, he is an obsessive micromanager, but one who disavows projects once they look doomed. As soon as the hunt for weapons of mass destruction seemed fruitless, he handed over the mission to the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld takes so much pummeling that he eventually becomes a strangely sympathetic character. While almost every other member of the Bush administration stiffed Woodward’s request for on-the-record interviews, Rumsfeld manfully subjected himself to two sessions — this despite his obvious disdain for the author. In the course of these interviews, Woodward breaks his own time-honored rules of access journalism. Instead of rewarding Rumsfeld’s openness, he uses the interviews to disprove his own reputation for softness. After Rumsfeld employs the metaphor of a “fruit bowl” to describe the administration’s varying methodologies for measuring insurgent attacks, Woodward writes: “I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a ‘fruit bowl,’ a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion.”

While Woodward reserves particular antipathy for Rumsfeld, his descriptions of nearly everyone else in the administration are equally damning. Every chapter in the book presents a heretofore uncovered anecdote of incompetence. Why did we botch postwar reconstruction? Weeks before the invasion, one of the men recruited to help rebuild Iraq is sitting in a library scraping for any bit of available information about “what we should do with the Iraqi Army.” Unfortunately, the United States government didn’t have any good intelligence on the subject. When Jay Garner, who was in charge of the reconstruction, asked Rice on the eve of the invasion how he should put together a postwar government, he didn’t receive an answer. Garner didn’t even know he should relocate his operations to the Middle East until Paul Wolfowitz told him, “You should already be there.”

Amid all of Woodward’s maddening reports of administration ham-handedness and arrogance, unintentional comedy abounds. He captures official Washington offering the lamest excuses as it trips over itself to deny responsibility for the Iraq war and the Bush era. George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, is shown decrying the Iraq invasion as a “mistake” on the eve of the war — despite Woodward’s previous reports of his “slam dunk” assessment of the Iraqi arsenal. After Richard Armitage’s initial pre-presidential encounters with George W. Bush, he “was not sure Bush filled the suit required of a president” — yet nevertheless went on to serve as his loyal servant for four years. But Woodward doesn’t render this rat-jump with the appropriate comic flair. He portrays these revisionist accounts with far more sympathy than they deserve.

This book, after all, is an object lesson in precisely this brand of retreat. You can easily understand Woodward’s urge to retreat. For the past decade, he has received unending abuse, suffering a devastating Joan Didion hatchet job and then the scorn of the anti-Bush left. His critics have turned him into a symbol of journalism’s rot, a leading force in the sad demise of adversarial reporting that led to Judith Miller and media passiveness in the face of Bush spin. After writing “All the President’s Men,” Woodward became one of them.

With “State of Denial,” you sense this (somewhat overwrought) critique has rattled Woodward. It has forced him to change his style. There’s less of his signature omniscience here — a style that not only reflected his proximity to power, but captured the self-confidence of the Washington Establishment. In its place, he has grown self-referential, nervously mentioning his past books, as well as inserting himself as a character into his own tale. That Bob Woodward has strayed from the Bob Woodward method tells you a lot about the state of American journalism.

Franklin Foer is the editor of The New Republic.