“We are now finally operating in all the belts around Baghdad as well as in Baghdad,” said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad. “We now have the ability to fight everywhere at once. One of the challenges is that we are now moving operations into areas where we haven’t been regularly.”  While the American military has not yet said whether any of the attacks in the last 48 hours involved the very powerful explosively formed projectiles, which are capable of hurling a solid fist of copper through armored vehicles, that type of bomb has also become a regular tool in the arsenal used by Shiite and Sunni Arab insurgents.  The most lethal attack came Thursday in northeastern Baghdad, when a powerful roadside bomb exploded near a vehicle, killing five soldiers, their Iraqi interpreter and three Iraqi civilians who were traveling with them.  In another attack Thursday, insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a military vehicle in Baghdad, killing one soldier and wounding two others.  On Wednesday, four soldiers were killed in western Baghdad when a roadside bomb struck their vehicle. One soldier was wounded in that attack. Southwest of Baghdad, two soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb. In Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, two marines died in combat on Wednesday, the military said.  At least three mortars hit the Green Zone, where the American Embassy and the Iraqi government are located. Twenty bodies were found around Baghdad on Thursday.  In Diyala Province, outside the area of the American offensive, six civilians were killed by gunmen.  In Baquba, the provincial capital, where the American offensive against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is under way, about 700 women, children and old men were reported to be making for the area to the north of the city in search of food and water despite the danger from the fighting, Iraqi security forces in Diyala reported.  The military also reported that it had mistakenly bombed a house in Diyala, wounding 11 people. The target was a booby-trapped house, but the bomb fell some distance from its target on the house of civilians. The military said it was investigating.  In Sulaiman Bek, in a part of northern Iraq where attacks have not been as lethal as in some areas, a suicide bomber drove his car into a compound of houses, a police station and the town hall, killing at least 17 people, including the mayor and the chairman of the City Council, and wounding 70 people, some of them severely, the police said.  In Hilla, Iraqi security forces and the American military raided local Shiite militia and party headquarters and sites where operatives for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia were thought to be hiding. Hilla, a mostly Shiite city, is in Babil Province, which is about 25 percent Sunni Arab.  There have been repeated attacks on predominantly Sunni villages in the province, believed to have been carried out by the Mahdi Army, the militia linked to Mr. Sadr. But another Shiite militia, the Badr Organization, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia are also thought to be active in the area.  The Babil Province police commander, Gen. Qais al-Mamorrey, said the operation now under way aimed to “fight the militia organizations in north of Babil, especially the Mahdi Army.”  “The main problem we face is a great shortage of police and army soldiers and equipment,” he said. “We need government support to purge the police force of bad police elements.”  He said that about 65 policemen had been removed from the force “after finding proof that they were involved in working for parties or militias.”  Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kirkuk, Hilla and Diyala.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: 14 Americans Are Killed in Combat in 2 Days. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Most of the American deaths were caused by roadside bombs, which were used in three of the five attacks.