BAGHDAD — Two US service members were killed and nine others were wounded when a Kurdish Iraqi soldier sprayed them with gunfire inside an Iraqi army commando base north of Baghdad yesterday afternoon, Iraqi and US military officials said.

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Yahoo! Buzz ShareThis .The two Americans, whose names were being withheld until relatives are notified, were the first US service members to be killed in Iraq since the Obama administration declared combat operations there officially over last week. The incident underscored the dangers still facing the nearly 50,000 US troops still in the country.

Details remained murky yesterday afternoon while the US military investigated the shooting. US troops had escorted their commander to an afternoon meeting at an Iraqi army base in Tuz Khurmatu, 55 miles south of Kirkuk. During the meeting, a man in an Iraqi army uniform opened fire, the US military said, adding that the assailant was shot dead at the scene.

It was unclear whether the young shooter, whom Iraqi security officials identified as Soran Rahman Taleh Wali, a Kurdish member of one of the Iraqi army’s special forces units, had planned the attack or acted spontaneously. His commander, Staff Colonel Ghaleb al-Bayati, said that Wali was playing volleyball with US troops inside the base when an argument escalated and Wali fired his weapon repeatedly.

“I’m not ruling anything out, but it seems pretty far-fetched that an altercation like this would be over a volleyball match,’’ said Major Lee Peters, a military spokesman for US forces in the north of Iraq. “We think this is an isolated incident, and it hasn’t broken our trust with the Iraqi security forces.’’

Peters said last night that he could not confirm whether the shooter was an Iraqi soldier.

The attack was the second within three days on an Iraqi base where US troops were present. On Sunday, a vehicle loaded with explosives detonated outside an Iraqi army headquarters in Baghdad, and at least four suicide bombers stormed the base, where several American service members are housed. Two gained entry before US and Iraqi forces repelled the assault, which left at least 12 Iraqis dead, most of them soldiers.

In Jumhouriyah, Wali’s neighborhood just a few miles from the base in Tuz Khurmatu, neighbors and family members would not speak about the 26-year-old yesterday, saying they feared repercussions.

The mostly Kurdish neighborhood had been the target of recent joint US and Iraqi missions to root out members of a Sunni insurgent group, Ansar al-Sunna, said Colonel Haywa Rasoul, of the Tuz Khurmatu police. Tuz Khurmatu has a mixed Kurdish, Turkmen, and Arab population. Some Iraqi security officials said the raids might have upset Wali, whom they described as short-tempered.

The US military confirmed that US troops had assisted in an Iraqi mission in the previous 24 hours to detain a man with a warrant out for his arrest, along with several other suspects. But it did not confirm the mission was related to Ansar al-Sunna.

“This is the first incident in which a Kurd killed Americans. We are worried that this might end the honeymoon between the Kurds and the Americans,’’ a Kurdish security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Since the end of combat operations, US troops in the north have fired only a few warning shots, the US military said. This year, at least 20 service members have been killed in Iraq, including in yesterday’s attack, according to iCasualties.org, a website that tracks military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 4,400 have died since the war began in 2003.

Also yesterday, a news anchor for the state television network al-Iraqiya was gunned down in the capital in what appeared to be part of an ongoing campaign of assassinations.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/09/08/2_us_troops_killed_in_attack_by_iraqi_soldier/