The city is divided between Kurds, Turkomen and Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and has long been feared to be a possible new flashpoint in Iraq.

Police Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir said two policemen were among the dead, while five police and eight officials with the Kurdish intelligence forces known as the Asayish were wounded. Dr. Khalid Ahmed of Kirkuk emergency hospital confirmed the total casualty count of seven killed and as many as 80 injured.

“We had just passed the car bomb — it was less than 40 yards away,” said policeman Meriwan Salih, whose arm was broken and who had shrapnel pierce his back when the third bomb exploded as his patrol sped by. “The huge blast threw me into the air.”

Kirkuk’s police chief, Maj. Gen. Jamal Tahir, said the suicide bomber got close to the Asayish headquarters by claiming to be a deliveryman on his way to pick up milk at an ice cream shop next door. Instead, the bomber slammed his pickup truck into a blast wall surrounding the headquarters around 10 a.m., sending flames through the building and damaging its front facade.

The second explosion hit a few blocks away, near a gas station. AP Television News footage showed police cars with blaring sirens racing to the headquarters when the third blast exploded, just down the street from the suicide bomber.

The third bombing knocked people to the ground, and was immediately followed by gunshots.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but Tahir said the Arab militant group Ansar al-Sunna last week threatened to target Kurdish security forces and political parties in Kirkuk.

“We have informed all security headquarters and political parties then to be careful and take security measures,” Tahir said. He said Kirkuk police also will investigate how the bombers got past security precautions to launch the attacks.

In addition to being an epicenter for ethnic tensions, Kirkuk also sits on top of one-third of Iraq’s estimated $11 trillion in oil reserves, and Arabs fear the Kurds want to annex the city to their northern autonomous region.

Last summer, Gen. Ray Odierno, who was then the top American military commander in Iraq, said U.N. peacekeeping forces may need to replace departing U.S. troops in disputed region if the feud between Arabs and minority Kurds continues through this year. His comments underscored the fragility of the area’s security — and the dangers if it is disrupted — although U.N. officials have not embraced his suggestion.

Grocery owner Shakhwan Ahmed, 30, said one of the blasts shook his shop, sending fruit and boxes crashing to the ground.

“It was chaos — horrified people were running,” said Ahmed, lamenting the attack after what he said was a nearly six-month lull in violence in Kirkuk. “There is no indication that there will be long-standing security in Iraq; there is always a security problem here. And terrorists are now telling us that they are coming back.”

The regional tensions also have stalled a long-awaited national census that would determine the real numbers of the country’s religious and ethnic groups. The count also could inflame the larger dispute over territory and oil between Iraq’s central government and the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north.

Central Statistics Authority spokesman Abdul-Zahra Hendawi said Wednesday the census is still stalled, which he blamed on “deep differences and mistrust” among Kirkuk’s ethnic groups.

Violence across Iraq has dropped dramatically from just a few years ago, but bombings and shootings still occur almost every day. In the city of Tal Afar, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) northwest of Kirkuk, two Iraqi army soldiers were killed when their convoy hit a roadside bomb Wednesday afternoon.

But Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, the spokesman for Baghdad security forces, said the capital is safe enough in many places to take down more of the thick concrete blast walls that line streets and surround buildings.

The next place the barriers will be taken down is in the northeast Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, he said Wednesday, because it has “witnessed a stabilized security.”

Sadr City was long a target for Sunni insurgents seeking to ignite sectarian warring in Baghdad. Al-Moussawi’s comments came a few hours after a bomb outside the al-Ansar Shiite mosque in Sadr City wounded two bystanders.

A second bombing a few miles (kilometers) away wounded two policemen about 15 minutes later, officials said.

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Jakes reported from Baghdad. Associated Press Writer Hamid Ahmed also contributed to this report.

“The Iraqi people for the first time, I suspect, I would argue, in their history are on the verge of literally creating a country that will be democratic, sustainable and, God willing, prosperous,” Biden told the troops at the military’s headquarters on the outskirts of Baghdad. “It could have a dramatic impact on this entire region, and God knows the Iraqi people deserve it.”

The White House has promised to end the war responsibly. “By that we meant we were going to end this by bringing you all home within a time certain, but leaving behind a country that was worthy of all the sacrifices that so many of your brothers and sisters have made,” Biden told the troops.

More than 4,400 U.S. troops have died since the 2003 invasion and an estimated 32,000 have been wounded.

Biden’s trip marks the first visit by a top U.S. official since Iraq approved a new Cabinet last month, breaking a political deadlock and jump-starting its stalled government after March’s inconclusive elections. But lingering security challenges remain: On Thursday, three bombings in the capital killed two people.

The address to U.S. troops capped a daylong series of meetings in Baghdad, including a session with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Biden then traveled to Irbil in northern Iraq to meet with Kurdish President Massoud Barzani.

Under a security agreement between Washington and Baghdad that was hammered out in 2008, all American troops are to leave Iraq by the end of the year. However, Iraq’s top military commander, Gen. Babaker Shawkat Zebari, has said U.S. troops should stay until Iraq’s security forces can defend its borders — which he said could take until 2020.

An aide to Biden said the vice president reiterated Washington’s longtime position that the Americans would listen to any request by the Iraqi government for troops to stay longer but that Baghdad has not yet asked them to do so. The official did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the talks.

Al-Maliki, under pressure from hardline Shiite Muslims, has signaled he wants American troops to leave on schedule. Last weekend, the influential and anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr returned to Iraq after nearly four years of exile in Iran, in part to insist that the U.S. “occupiers” must leave on time or face retribution among his followers “by all the means of resistance.”

A spokesman for al-Maliki, Ali al-Dabbagh, said both sides during the meeting between his boss and Biden “committed themselves to the date of withdrawal” and emphasized that the departure date of U.S. troops is fixed.

Iraq must walk a careful line, balancing its relationship with the United States and its Shiite-majority neighbor, Iran, to the east. Iran views a continued U.S. military presence along its western border with suspicion and is believed to be lobbying its Iraqi allies to adhere to the timeline.

Both Washington and Baghdad had refused to discuss publicly any possibility of U.S. troops staying until after Iraq installed its new government. Biden congratulated Iraq on accomplishing that political feat, which took months of negotiations.

“I’m here to help the Iraqis celebrate the progress they’ve made. They’ve formed a government and that’s a good thing,” Biden told reporters before meeting with U.S. ambassador James F. Jeffrey and U.S. commander Gen. Lloyd Austin at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

About 47,000 U.S. forces remain in Iraq, and American military leaders have said privately they will need to start planning by early spring on how to get them home unless told otherwise.

Keeping troops in Iraq presents political headaches both for President Barack Obama, who is up for re-election next year and promised to end the war in his 2008 campaign, and for al-Maliki, who held onto a second term as prime minister only with al-Sadr’s support.

The visit is Biden’s seventh since January 2009. He arrived in Iraq after stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the U.S. has refocused its efforts against al-Qaida and allied extremist groups that threaten American security.

Biden was last in Baghdad in September for a military ceremony at the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq.

In a statement, al-Maliki’s office lashed out at WikiLeaks, accusing it of creating a national uproar by releasing documents that it said were being used “against national parties and leaders, especially against the prime minister.”

Al-Maliki’s office questioned the timing of the release, but expressed confidence in “our peoples’ awareness regarding such games or media bubbles that are motivated by known political goals.”

The statement said the documents did not present any proof of detainees being improperly treated while al-Maliki has headed Iraq’s Shiite-led government. Instead, it praised him as courageous for taking a tough stance against terrorists. It did not offer any details.

Cases of prisoner abuse were also widely reported in Iraq before al-Maliki took the top job.

Al-Maliki’s political opponents quickly seized on the documents to highlight their long-standing concerns about a possible second al-Maliki term as prime minister.

A spokeswoman for the Sunni-backed Iraqiya political alliance that won the most seats in the March national election said the WikiLeaks documents show why it’s important to have a power-sharing system of government in Iraq.

“Putting all the security powers in the hands of one person who is the general commander of the armed forces have led to these abuses and torture practices in Iraqi prisons,” Iraqiya spokeswoman Maysoun al-Damlouji said in an interview Saturday.

“Al-Maliki wants to have all powers in his hands,” she said.

Most of the victims of abuse at the hands of Iraqi security were believed to be Sunnis. In March, Sunnis turned out in droves to vote for the secular Iraqiya bloc led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, who is Shiite.

The Sunni push gave Iraqiya a narrow two-seat win over al-Maliki’s State of Law bloc, but Iraqiya still fell far short of capturing enough support to control parliament and oust him. The close vote touched off a scramble as the sides seek enough support from other parties to secure a majority in the 325-seat parliament.

Until the WikiLeaks papers surfaced Friday, al-Maliki appeared closest to garnering the 163 seats needed for a majority, with the backing of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who lives in self-imposed exile in Iran.

The leaked documents include hundreds of reports from across Iraq with allegations of abuse. In a typical case from August 2006, filed by the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. forces discovered a murder suspect who claimed that Iraqi police hung him from the ceiling by handcuffs, tortured him with boiling water and beat him with rods.

A “serious incident report” filed in December 2009 in Tal Afar said U.S. forces had obtained footage of about a dozen Iraqi army soldiers — including a major — executing a detainee. The video showed the bound prisoner being pushed into the street and shot, the Americans said. There was no indication of what happened to the video, or to the Iraqi major or his soldiers. The incident is marked “closed.”

Iraq’s government has long faced accusations of prisoner abuse, including as recently as this spring.

Hadi Jalo, a political analyst at Baghdad University, said the timing of the WikiLeaks release is likely more damaging to al-Maliki’s hopes of winning a second term in office than the revelations of abuse themselves.

“The information of abuses and executions in Iraqi prisons is not new and Iraqis know of torture practices,” Jalo said. “The WikiLeaks releases might force al-Maliki into making more political concessions in his bid to stay in power.”

Although Iraqis are not surprised by the new abuse allegations, they nevertheless said the documents cast even greater doubt on the evenhandedness of the nation’s security forces.

If true, they “will strongly shake the already weak trust of people with government, police and army troops, and will badly spoil their reputation,” said Mohammed Tahsin Ghalib, 46, a college professor from Mosul, a Sunni-dominated city located 225 miles (360 kilometers) northwest of Baghdad.

Some Iraqis went a step farther.

“If this government stays in power, violations will still be committed against Iraqi people,” said Salawan Rashid, 49, a grocery store owner in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of the capital.

But Iraqis also placed some blame on the United States, accusing American forces of doing little to stop prisoner abuse that, according to the WikiLeaks documents, they knew was happening.

Abdul Nasir Ahmed, a pharmacy owner in a Sunni-dominated area in north Baghdad, said Iraqi forces learned from Americans “how to kick the door of a house open and assault family members while they are sleeping.”

Speaking to an audience of Iraqis on Saturday, U.S. Ambassador James F. Jeffrey said the newly released documents are being carefully studied, and said some of the allegations they include “may or may not be a hundred percent correct.”

“We are very troubled by any claim of any action undertaken — first of all by our own forces, or by our allies and partners, the Iraqi forces,” Jeffrey said.

Al-Maliki’s office said in its statement that the government also would review the documents’ authenticity. It said the review will determine whether a criminal investigation of the abuses should be launched, “or whether they are part of the political feuds that do not serve the interests of Iraq and the Iraqis.”

——

Yacoub reported from Amman, Jordan.

The U.S. military has repeatedly resisted Associated Press requests to share its comprehensive figures on Iraqi civilian casualties, and the new data was released without comment or explanation when it was quietly posted on the U.S. Central Command’s website in July.

The figures were discovered this week during a routine check by The AP for civilian and military casualty numbers that were first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act. A spokesman at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., could not immediately explain how the tally was compiled or why it was released.

The spokesman, Lt. Col. Michael T. Lawhorn, also could not clarify Thursday whether the new casualty numbers included suspected insurgents, or whether government-backed Sunni fighters known as Sahwa, or Awakening Councils, were included in the number of Iraqi security forces killed.

In all, the U.S. data tallied 76,939 Iraqi security officials and civilians killed and 121,649 wounded between January 2004 and August 2008. The count shows 3,952 American and other U.S.-allied international troops were killed over the same period.

The figures did not specify whether the civilian deaths were caused by sectarian violence, but appeared to track charts previously released by the Defense Department of Iraqis killed during Operation Iraqi Freedom who died as a result of hostile violence — as opposed to accidents or natural causes.

Those charts — which did not provide concrete numbers — were based on data compiled by U.S. and Iraqi government figures.

The U.S. count falls short of casualty figures compiled by Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry.

The ministry said in its report released last October that 85,694 people were killed from the beginning of 2004 to Oct. 31, 2008, and 147,195 were wounded. The figures included Iraqi civilians, military and police, but did not cover U.S. military deaths, insurgents, or foreigners, including contractors. Like the new U.S. figures, the Iraqi report did not include the first months of the war after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

A tally by the Iraq Body Count, a private, British-based group that has tracked civilian casualties since the war began, estimates that between 98,252 and 107,235 Iraqi civilians were killed between March 2003 to Sept. 19, 2010. The group has used media reports and other sources to reach its tally.

Until last month, The AP compiled its own daily body count of Iraqi civilians killed in sectarian violence, excluding insurgents. Overall, The AP tallied 49,416 Iraqi security officials and civilians killed since April 28, 2005 and Sept. 30, 2010. That figure underrepresented the true casualty number because many killings went unreported, especially in more remote areas.

The Central Command figures represent the largest release of raw data by the U.S. military to detail deaths during the Iraq war. The military has repeatedly resisted sharing its numbers, which it uses to determine security trends.

A notable exception, however, came this year when U.S. military officials in Baghdad decided to release their July 2010 Iraqi casualty tally refute the Iraqi government’s much higher monthly figures. That decision was made weeks before U.S. forces withdrew all but 50,000 troops from Iraq — as ordered by President Barack Obama in an attempt to wind down the war and tout the nation’s improved security.

Even so, counting the number of Iraqis killed has always been difficult, and tallies have widely varied depending on the source.

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Associated Press writers Mazin Yahya and Hamid Ahmed in Baghdad and AP Investigative Researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.

That reality was front and center at a change-of-command ceremony in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces outside Baghdad that the American military now uses as its headquarters. Officials warned of a tough road ahead as the U.S. moves into the final phase of the 7 1/2-year war.

Of paramount concern is Iraqi leaders’ continued bickering, six months after parliamentary elections, over forming a new government — a political impasse that could further endanger stability and fuel a diminished but still dangerous insurgency.

“Iraq still faces a hostile enemy who is determined to hinder progress,” Gen. Lloyd Austin, the newly installed commander of the just under 50,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq, told the swelling crowd that was clad in military fatigues and political suits. “Make no mistake, our military forces here and those of the Iraqi nation remain committed to ensuring that our friends in Iraq succeed.”

Vice President Joe Biden presided over the gathering at al-Faw palace, Saddam’s gaudy former hunting lodge replete with fake marble walls and a huge chandelier made of recycled plastic.

The remaining U.S. forces in Iraq would be “as combat ready, if need be, as any in our military,” Biden said, flanked by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen for the 75-minute ceremony, which also changed the U.S. mission’s name from “Operation Iraqi Freedom” to “Operation New Dawn.”

Three years ago, about 170,000 U.S. troops were in Iraq. Of those who remain, fewer than 10 percent — or 4,500 — are special forces who will regularly go on raids and capture terrorists, albeit alongside Iraqi troops.

Obama ordered the end of combat missions by Aug. 31 in a step toward a full withdrawal of American forces by the end of next year that was mandated in a U.S.-Iraqi security agreement.

Violence also has declined dramatically since early 2007, when the Pentagon poured tens of thousands more troops into Iraq over a matter of months to quell a Sunni insurgency that had lured the country to the brink of civil war. Additionally, a Sunni revolt against al-Qaida in Iraq and a Shiite militia cease-fire have helped tamp down attacks, although bombings and shootings across Iraq continue on a near-daily basis.

But Iraqi forces are heavily dependent on U.S. firepower, along with helicopters, spy data and other key tools for combating terrorists that they won’t be able to supply on their own for years to come.

“Every soldier I have knows that fighting is not over because there are groups here that still want to hurt us,” Maj. Gen. Tony Cucolo, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq’s volatile north, told The Associated Press recently. “But clearly combat operations is not in our mission statement.”

In Hawija, once a hub for Sunni militants and Saddam’s disaffected allies located 150 miles north of Baghdad, roughly 80 U.S. soldiers teamed up with more than 1,000 Iraqis to arrest about 60 terror suspects in the early morning raid Wednesday.

From checkpoints and command centers to helicopters hovering overhead, the Americans were on hand at the request of Iraqi police. But it was the Iraqis who went into houses and arrested suspected insurgents — including two considered high-value targets — while the U.S. watched the operation from afar.

Hours before the raids, Lt. Col. Andy Ulrich gave his soldiers a pep talk to counter concerns they weren’t on a worthwhile mission.

“You all are combat troops not doing a combat mission, although it looks smells and feels and hurts a lot like combat,” Ulrich said.

“Don’t worry about what the politicians are saying because we have a mission,” he added. “The bad part is, we can’t go kicking the doors ourselves and get these guys. We’ve got to kind of convince Iraqis to do it, but the good part is, they’re kind of willing to do it.”

Iraqi forces across Baghdad appeared to be on heightened alert, aiming to reassure the populace and ward off insurgent attacks to coincide with the change in command.

Intelligence officials had warned al-Qaida in Iraq might use the U.S. military’s shifting mission to launch suicide bombings around the capital in the days leading up to Wednesday’s ceremony. However, the day was relatively quiet, except for a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad that police said killed one person.

At the Baghdad ceremony, Gen. Ray Odierno, the outgoing commander, formally ended his nearly five-year tour in Iraq on a reflective note.

“This period in Iraq’s history will probably be remembered for sacrifice, resilience and change,” Odierno said. “However, I remember it as a time in which the Iraqi people stood up against tyranny, terrorism and extremism, and decided to determine their own destiny as a people and as a democratic state.”

Then, wistfully using his military call sign one last time, Odierno ended his remarks: “Lion 6 — out.”

Obama ordered the refocusing of the U.S. mission last year to fulfill a campaign promise of ending what he once termed “a dumb war” and one that Gates acknowledged Wednesday was launched without justification. In an address Tuesday night Obama announced the end of American combat, but made clear that this was no victory celebration.

“Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission,” the president said.

Defining the front lines in a war where soldiers who are attacked while delivering supplies could just as easily return fire as Marines while on a raid to round up suspected insurgents has never been easy. Some of the key ongoing threats to the safety of American forces are the same as they’ve always been: rockets, mortars and roadside bombs.

U.S. military officials have said Iranian-backed militias are stepping up their attacks against targets in Baghdad, trying to make it look like they’re driving out the Americans. Since arriving in Iraq, the battalion taking part in the Hawija raids has been hit by rocket and grenade attacks on their patrols and on their base almost every other day.

In the western Iraqi city of Ramadi before the ceremony, Gates told reporters the U.S. would consider keeping some military forces in place past next year, if the Iraqi government requests it.

Asked whether the U.S. was still at war in Iraq, Gates answered succinctly, “I would say we are not.”

He was less definitive about whether the 7 1/2-year war was worthwhile. More than 4,400 American troops and an estimated 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since the 2003 invasion, and billions of dollars have been poured into the war effort.

Claiming that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, then-President George W. Bush ordered the invasion with approval of a Congress still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Bush’s claims were based on faulty intelligence, and the weapons were never found.

“The problem with this war, I think, for many Americans, is that the premise on which we justified going to war turned out not to be valid,” Gates said. “Even if the outcome is a good one from the standpoint of the United States, it’ll always be clouded by how it began.”

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Jakes reported from Baghdad and Alleruzzo from Hawija. AP National Security Correspondent Anne Gearan in Ramadi and AP writers Barbara Surk and Rebecca Santana in Baghdad contributed to this report.