BAGHDAD: More than 25 Marines were killed across Iraq in one of the bloodiest days for US troops as the military said yesterday 3,200 new troops had arrived to quell Baghdad violence.

The US military in a series of statements piling up the body count, listed a helicopter crash, insurgent attacks and roadside bombs as being responsible for the high casualty rate.

On Saturday, 12 servicemen were killed in a helicopter crash, five in a clash with gunmen in the holy Shi'ite city of Karbala and five more in separate incidents in western Anbar, heartland of the Sunni insurgency, whose deaths were announced yesterday.

One soldier was killed when a roadside bomb hit his patrol north of Baghdad and two others died elsewhere.

The bloody toll came three days before US President George W Bush is expected to use his State of the Union address to Congress to argue again for his plan to send thousands more troops to Iraq, despite opposition from Democrats who now control both houses of the legislature.

US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton reiterated her opposition Bush's decision to send 21,500 more US troops to Iraq.

She also strongly criticised Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki saying she does not have "any faith" in his ability to bring security to Iraq.

Clinton, a Democratic senator, said the US government should threaten to cut funding for Iraq's forces to prod Baghdad into stepping up its efforts to control raging sectarian violence in Iraq.

She said in the interview that it was uncertain "whether there's a gap between Maliki's intentions and his will ... or whether he's doing what he intends to do."

"So you know, there's a mixed message at best, and I think that's what the Bush administration has never come to grips with," the New York senator said days after returning from Iraq.

British minister Peter Hain said the United States messed up the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and made the situation in the country "far worse".

Hain last week denounced Bush as running the most right-wing American administration in living memory and said Bush's foreign policy had "failed wherever it's been tried".

A Newsweek poll found that more than two-thirds of Americans opposed sending 21,500 more troops to Iraq, the cornerstone of Bush's policy shift for the war-torn nation. About 68pc said Washington should not send additional troops, while 26pc support the increase.

Armed saboteurs set an oil well ablaze yesterday near the disputed northern city of Kirkuk. Gunmen overpowered soldiers guarding an oil field 45km west of Kirkuk, planted explosives at a well head and set them off, the Northern Iraqi Oil Company said. A spokesman for the national oil protection force, an army unit, said six soldiers had been disarmed and tied up by attackers who fled following the blast.

Meanwhile, historians are forecasting a 'bleak' prospect for Iraq. The Middle East historian David Fromkin sees a breakup of the jerry-built nation. Phebe Marr, doyenne of Iraq scholars, sees "distrust and suspicion" too deep to overcome. "Bleak," concludes Baghdad University's Saad Al Hadithi.

"At the moment," said the British historian Niall Ferguson, "a happy ending has a 1-in-100 look about it."

Mohamed El Sayed Said, of Cairo's Al Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, said he expects the growing US political opposition to the war will lead at some point to a redeployment of American troops to northern Iraq's Kurdistan and to elsewhere in the Gulf region.