A U.S. soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on Saturday night and a U.S. Marine died during combat in Anbar province on Sunday, the military said, raising to at least 2,865 the number of U.S. service members who have died since the beginning of the Iraq war. This month in Iraq, 47 American service members have been killed or died.

In Baghdad, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met privately with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem on Monday during the second and final day of Moallem's visit to Iraq.

Afterward, government spokesman Ali Al-Dabagh told reporters the meeting was successful.

"There is a very strong Syrian desire to develop relations between the two countries. Stability and security in Iraq means stability and security in Syria and other countries in the region," Al-Dabagh said.

"There are tremendous fields of cooperation between the two countries, and they will be started once all security issues and other problems are solved."

When Moallem arrived on his groundbreaking diplomatic mission Sunday, the highest level Syrian official ever to visit Iraq since the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein, he called for a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces to help end Iraq's sectarian bloodbath.

Syria and Iraq share a long and porous desert border and both Baghdad and Washington have accused Damascus of not doing enough to stop the flow of foreign Arab fighters.

For the second time in two days, coalition forces raided Sadr City in Baghdad on Monday. The stronghold of a Shiite militia is suspected of having carried out the mass kidnaping at the Ministry of Higher Education.

Iraqi forces searched and damaged a mosque during the operation, but made no arrests, the U.S. military said. The Iraqi forces, acting with the assistance of U.S. military advisers, also destroyed a vehicle near the mosque that was posing a threat to the ground forces, the coalition said.

Iraqi and U.S. forces suffered no casualties.

In Sadr City, witnesses and an official at the main office of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr told the AP that in addition to the mosque, coalition forces searched several homes, arrested three Iraqis and briefly clashed with Mahdi Army militiamen. Speaking on condition of anonymity out of concern for their own security, the witnesses and official said the raid began at about 3 a.m.

Meanwhile, British and Iraqi forces raided homes in southern Iraq on Monday and arrested four suspects in the kidnapping of four American security guards and their Austrian co-worker, an official said.

The raid, which began late Sunday and ended early Monday morning, took place in Zubair, a mostly Sunni-Arab enclave about 20 miles south of Basra, Capt. Tane Dunlop, the British military spokesman, told The Associated Press. Most of Britain's 7,200 soldiers in Iraq are based in the city.

On Sunday, Iraqi police showed the media 200 suspected insurgents they had arrested the night before while raiding several areas north of Basra, which is 340 miles southeast of Baghdad.

Both raids failed to find any of the hostages in southern Iraq, a mostly Shiite region.

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