BAGHDAD - In fierce resistance to U.S. efforts to secure the Syrian border, insurgents killed eight American troops in one day in car bombings and an ambush, Army and Marine officials said yesterday.

The deadly attacks Monday in western Iraq included the ambush of six Marines on a foot patrol outside of Haditha, Marine officials said. Five of the Marines were killed by small-arms fire in the initial assault, but one was “unaccounted for” and later found dead a couple of miles away, a Marine statement said. Officials declined to say whether he was taken hostage before he was killed, and the military was investigating the incident.

A seventh Marine was killed by a car bomb in nearby Hit. All of the slain Marines were assigned to Regimental Combat Team-2 of the 2nd Marine Division.

A U.S. Army soldier was killed near the Syrian border in a car bombing that also injured an Army Times reporter.

At least 25 American service members have been killed in Iraq in the past 10 days - all but two in combat.

After the attack on the Marines, residents of Haditha said, several masked gunmen identifying themselves as members of the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, a major Sunni Arab insurgent group, appeared in the market carrying helmets, flak jackets and automatic rifles they said belonged to U.S. troops.

They distributed fliers claiming they had killed the American service members.

“They were on a mountain near the town so we went up, surrounded them and asked them to surrender,” the statement said. “They did not surrender so we killed them.”

There was no word from the military on whether any insurgents were killed in the incidents. The deaths of the Americans, though, highlight the intensity of the fighting in the area after a recent order by Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in the country, to control Iraq’s western border by November.

Two weeks ago, Army troops with the 1st Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division began setting up the first long-term U.S. outpost in the northern Euphrates River valley, in the small city of Rawah, and are seeking to wrest control of a historic smuggling route.

Military officials say intelligence reports suggest that insurgents have been using the route to ferry in as many as 200 foreign fighters each month from Syria, along with bomb-laden cars and trucks, east to Baghdad and other city centers.

While car bombs have become routine in the capital and in the area around Mosul in northern Iraq, they were relatively rare in western Iraq until recently.

U.S. military officials generally agree that foreign fighters make up less than 10 percent of the insurgency but play a major role in coordinating and directing large attacks. A majority of the insurgents, U.S. authorities say, are Sunni Arabs from Iraq.

As the military pressed on with its campaign in western Iraq, families in the impoverished Baghdad neighborhood of Abu Disheer mourned the deaths of 22 Shiite Muslim men who were executed and left Monday in a trash heap in the nearby Um Maalif area.

Yesterday, a dozen shuttered shops bore black signs announcing the deaths of their owners in a neighborhood dotted with signs from earlier incidents. The men were shot in the head and chest, and police said some showed signs of torture.

What made the incident unusual, officials said, was that none of the men appeared to have a connection with the government or security forces, except for two former police officers. Insurgents frequently target Iraqi security forces, accusing them of collaboration with the United States.

The killers wore military uniforms and drove Ministry of Defense vehicles, said Jawad Maliki, the head of the security committee in the National Assembly, who added that he confirmed the account with the Ministry of Defense.

It was not known whether the killers were in fact ministry employees or had perhaps stolen uniforms and cars from the government. Maliki called for an investigation into whether the killers were MOD employees.

Neighbors said the uniformed men knocked on the doors of the men’s homes, all within a few blocks, about sunset Sunday and asked for them by name, saying the men were wanted for questioning. One, auto electrician Abu Rasool, asked the uniformed men whether they were capturing militants and was killed after he was asked to join the detained men, neighbors said.

It remained unclear whether the killings were part of an escalation of attacks between Sunnis and Shiites or internecine violence among rival Shiite groups. U.S. military officials say they have seen a recent increase in attacks by Sunni insurgents on Shiites in an apparent effort to foment a civil war between the fractious Muslim sects.

Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of the insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq, claimed in a recent audiotape that it had formed a new wing to fight the Badr Brigade, a Shiite militia, and he also denounced the Iraq Army as “an army of apostates and mercenaries that has allied itself with the crusaders who came to destroy Islam and fight Muslims.”

Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the top ground commander in Iraq, said in a recent interview that the Sunni-Shiite violence is “not a new phenomenon, but it has taken an increasingly vile and revolting turn because Zarqawi has targeted the Shiite mosques and population.”

The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper. The Associated Press contributed to this article.

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