BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A series of insurgent strikes, a combination of car bombs and small-arms fire, left at least 22 people dead and dozens wounded in Iraq today, the latest attacks in a seemingly relentless offensive.

A total of 12 members of the Iraqi National Guard died in separate and apparently coordinated attacks in Baquba, about 40 miles north of Baghdad, just before 8 a.m., a spokesman for the guard said. Thirty gunmen armed with a variety of weapons attacked a checkpoint, the spokesman said, killing 5 soldiers and wounding 2 others

Also at about 8 a.m., 7 soldiers were killed and 17 people were wounded, 4 of them civilians, when a suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of guards in the city.

Some five minutes later, a suicide pickup truck exploded outside the homes of two officers in the new Iraqi Army Battalion 203 in Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. The two, who were identified as Maj. Muhammed Ali Abdul Mutalib, and his brother, a captain whose first name is Mudher, were slightly wounded.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said the two officers' houses were completely destroyed and that the front of a nearby high school for boys was badly damaged.

Five people were killed, including two teenage boys, and 24 were wounded in the blast, the spokesman said. Other reports put the death toll as high as 16.

Twenty-three of the wounded were teachers and children from the high school and the other was a National Guardsman, a hospital official in Balad said.

Many of the teachers and children were critically wounded in the blast, the hospital official said. Some were transferred from a hospital in Balad to a medical center in Baghdad and an American Army base in Balad.

In Baghdad, gunmen killed two police officers and wounded a third in a drive-by shooting in the slum section called Sadr City, a director of the hospital to which the casualties were taken told The Associated Press.

Two civilians were also killed, the agency said, when a roadside bomb aimed at a joint American-Iraqi convoy, exploded in the northeastern New Baghdad suburb. The explosion missed the convoy but damaged two passing cars, wounding four people, the agency quoted an Iraqi Army officer as saying.

In more violence in the capital, an Iraqi police sergeant was killed and one was wounded when a gunman opened fire this afternoon against two police patrols in the northern Ghazaliyia section, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The gunman, who fled the scene, was sitting close to the district's new police station when he opened fire, the spokesman added.

Gunmen also fired on four trucks operated by the Ministry of Trade north of Baghdad today and then set fire to the trucks' contents, an Interior Ministry spokesman said. In response, an American patrol raided farms in the area, killing three people, wounding two and capturing 28, the spokesman said. He said the patrol also recovered mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and launchers.

By Mona Mahmoud
New York Times

Mona Mahmoud reported from Baghdad for this article, and Terence Neilan contributed reporting from New York.