Baghdad, Iraq ? Iraq’s most feared terrorist group said Wednesday it killed two kidnapped Algerian diplomats because of Algeria’s ties to the United States and its crackdown on Islamic extremists.

The diplomats’ deaths brought to three the number of foreign envoys reported killed this month as part of a militant campaign to isolate Iraq’s embattled government within the Arab and Muslim world. Two other apparent kidnapping attempts against diplomats were foiled.

Algeria’s state radio broke into its programming to announce the killings. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika called it “odious” and cowardly to murder envoys from countries that are friends of the Iraqi people, and vowed to pursue the killers.

Algeria opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, although it has in recent years become a close U.S. ally, particularly in investigating and arresting Islamic extremists. Al-Qaida in Iraq, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, linked the killing of the diplomats to the Algerian crackdown.

Algeria’s chief envoy Ali Belaroussi and fellow diplomat Azzedine Belkadi were slain because their government represses Muslims “in violation of God’s will,” said a chilling Internet statement posted in the name of al-Qaida in Iraq.

The statement provided no photographic evidence of the deaths, and the statement’s authenticity could not be confirmed.

Belaroussi, 62, and Belkadi, 47, were dragged from their cars and kidnapped at gunpoint July 21 in Baghdad’s upscale Mansour neighborhood. They appeared – blindfolded and in captivity – in a video posted Tuesday on the Internet.

“Didn’t we warn you, O enemies of God, not to be loyal to the Jews and the Christians and to stand by the side of America or to carry out its plans? We are saying it again,” said the al-Qaida statement which claimed the two had been put to death.

Egyptian envoy Ihab al-Sherif, 51, was seized July 2, and al-Qaida later claimed he had been killed, although no photos were made public and no body was found. Top envoys from Pakistan and Bahrain escaped kidnapping attempts a few days after al-Sherif disappeared.

More than 210 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq; at least 40 have been killed, including nine by al-Qaida in Iraq of other followers of al-Zarqawi.

The announced killings highlighted the perilous security situation more than two years after U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. At least 15 Iraqi police, soldiers and civilians were slain nationwide Wednesday in scattered attacks.

U.S. troops clamped a curfew on Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, after a roadside bomb killed an American soldier and wounded five others, the U.S. command said.

Samarra, site of some of Iraq’s most famous Islamic shrines, has been an insurgent flashpoint since Iraqi authorities lost control of the city to al-Qaida-linked extremists last year. U.S. troops recaptured the city and maintain tenuous control.

U.S. death toll

At least 1,782 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count Wednesday.