The seven marines were killed Sunday in the restive western Al-Anbar province, which contains the rebel flashpoint towns of Ramadi and Fallujah, where fighting flared after days of relative calm following last month's blistering assault on the rebel city, the military said.

The US soldiers, assigned to the Ist Marine Expeditionary Force, were killed in action in two separate operations, the marines said in a statement, which gave no further details.

The deaths will do nothing to lift the spirits of the US-led coalition forces just a year after Saddam was captured.

They also came amid a fierce insurgency just seven weeks ahead of next month's planned elections.

The anniversary of Saddam's capture near his hometown of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, came the day after the US military denied that the toppled leader was protesting his detention along with other former Iraqi officials by holding a hunger strike.

"This absolutely does not involve Saddam. He's in good condition and is continuing with his normal routine, which includes taking his meals," Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a spokesman for detention operations in Iraq, said Sunday.

The Iraqi lawyer of former deputy premier Tareq Aziz said Saddam and 11 top officials of his ousted regime had been on hunger strike since Friday to protest ill-treatment in their secret US detention center.

"I call on the International Committee of the Red Cross to intervene immediately to check on the prisoners' condition," lawyer Badiaa Aref Ezzat said.

Johnson said seven of the detainees "have been making a show of not taking meals beginning after the breakfast meal yesterday (Saturday)" but had been snacking from military rations they receive each day.

All of them receive a military MRE (ready-to-eat) meal a day, Johnson said.

The other five, including Saddam, have been eating regularly, and all but two said they would resume eating normal meals, he said. All had been drinking fluids.

Johnson indicated that the detainees wanted more visits from the International Red Cross.

Saddam was captured by US forces on December 13, 2003, and faces charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. His legal team has repeatedly accused the United States of denying them access to their client.

The 67-year-old former president is being held in US custody in a secret location in Iraq and has reportedly received recent treatment for an enlarged prostate gland, hernia problems and eye trouble.

Iraq's interim government has said he will go on trial after the January 30 elections, billed as the first free vote to be held in the country in half a century.

According to the latest edition of US News and World Report, Saddam planned the insurgency that continues to engulf Iraq well before his capture.

The magazine quoted a military intelligence report as saying that in late 2002, Saddam sent more than 1,000 security and intelligence officials to two military facilities near Baghdad for two months of guerrilla training.

Whatever the case, the violence continued to claim the lives of US and Iraqi forces across Iraq over the weekend.

US warplanes fired missiles at targets in Fallujah on Sunday, an AFP correspondent embedded with the military said, as marines seized dozens of weapons during house-to-house searches.

Insurgents also attacked an Iraqi national guard unit in central Baghdad with hand grenades, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, the US military said, adding that the Iraqi troops suffered no casualties.

A police officer was killed and another wounded overnight when gunmen ambushed their patrol in Yethreb, north of Baghdad, police said.

In Rashid, in an area just south of Baghdad dubbed "the triangle of death," about 20 gunmen attacked a police station with mortars and small arms fire, witnesses said. Three civilians were wounded in the incident, a doctor at the local hospital said.

Iraqi security forces, who are not as well equipped or trained as their US counterparts, have been increasingly targeted by rebels in the approach to the January elections.

In Baghdad, a US soldier died from his wounds after his patrol was hit by a homemade bomb that wounded three other troops on Saturday, the army said.

A US army humvee was destroyed by a car bomb targeting an American convoy in the northern city of Kirkuk, wounding two soldiers, police Major General Turhan Yussef told AFP.

The US army in the region could not immediately confirm that its troops had been attacked in the oil city.

An Iraqi was killed and one of his sons injured when US soldiers opened fire on them when they were trying to pass a checkpoint in central Kirkuk, according to Yussef.

The latest figures from the Pentagon -- released December 10 -- put the number of US troops killed in combat in Iraq since the start of last year's invasion at 1,007. These do not include deaths over the weekend.

Iraq Body Count, an association of academics and peace activists who compile statistics using media reports, puts the number of Iraqi civilians killed as a result of coalition military action at up to nearly 17,000.

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