FIVE American soldiers have been killed in central Iraq, the US military said in a statement."Five US service members were killed Monday in central Iraq," the statement said, without giving further details.
An interior ministry official and an Iraqi police officer said five rockets struck the US's sprawling Camp Victory base on Baghdad's outskirts, but Captain Dan Churchill, a US military spokesman, declined to give details on how the soldiers died.
Monday's deaths bring to 4,459 the number of American soldiers to die in Iraq since the US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003, according to an AFP tally based on independent website www.icasualties.org.
Some 45,000 US soldiers are still based in Iraq, primarily charged with training and equipping their Iraqi counterparts, though they still take part in joint counter terror operations.
All American forces must withdraw from Iraq completely by the end of the year, according to the terms of a bilateral security pact.