SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq — A suicide car bomb exploded near a regional government ministry in a predominantly Kurdish province of Sulaimaniyah on today, killing at least nine people and wounding four, a security official said.

The U.S. military announced that two Marines were killed by a roadside bomb during fighting with insurgents on Friday near Amiriyah, a village in western Baghdad. That raised to 1,999 the number of members of the U.S. military who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Also today, Iraqi and U.S. forces refortified a hotel complex housing foreign journalists in central Baghdad after three suicide car bombs exploded the day before, killing as many as 20 Iraqis and wounding about 40.

The crews repaired a breach in the blast walls around the Palestine and Sheraton hotels. One of the bombs had blown a hole in the wall, enabling a cement truck packed with explosives to enter the compound and detonate, causing considerable damage to the Palestine Hotel, which houses The Associated Press, Fox News and other media organizations.

The blast in Sulaimaniyah occurred on the outskirts of the city right outside the ministry that houses Kurdish forces known as peshmerga. It killed six peshmerga and three civilians and wounded two peshmerga and two civilians, said Lt. Col. Taha Redha, a peshmerga official.

It was one of two suicide attacks by insurgents today in the generally peaceful province 160 miles northeast of Baghdad.

About 45 minutes earlier, a suicide car bomber rammed his vehicle into a seven-car convoy carrying Mullah Bakhtiyar, a senior Kurdish official in President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, said police Col. Najim Al-Din Qader. The blast in Sulaimaniyah city wounded two of the convoy's guards and damaged two of its cars, Qader said.

Sulaimaniyah — the city and province share the same name — is where the PUK party is based, and it is considered one of the most peaceful areas of Iraq.

In Baghdad, insurgents used three bombs and five shootings today to kill two people — a 7-year-old boy and a policeman — and wound 34 Iraqis, most of them police officers, officials said.

The roadside bomb that killed the boy exploded in Askan, a commercial district, hitting pedestrians and destroying several parked cars, said police Capt. Qassim Hussein and Dr. Mohammed Jawad at Yarmouk Hospital. The nine wounded civilians in that attack included a 10-year-old Iraqi girl, they said.

Another policewoman died in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, when militants shot her, police said.

As the U.S. military death toll in the Iraq war nears 2,000, the Iraqi death toll is unknown, but estimates range much higher.