Dutch Embassy attacked after nightfall.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Attackers fired two rocket-propelled grenades at the Dutch Embassy in Iraq on Friday night, hitting the roof with one and setting it on fire. The blaze was quickly extinguished, and there were no injuries.

A senior U.S. officer said coalition forces were prepared to deal with any surge in violence during a coming Muslim holiday. The start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan last year was accompanied by a sharp escalation in insurgent attacks.

One grenade exploded on the roof of the Dutch Embassy after nightfall, triggering a small fire. Security guards said a second grenade missed the building.

Hours after the embassy attack, the sound of strong explosions reverberated through the Iraqi capital. A U.S. military spokesman said he had no information on the cause of the blasts, which could be heard in the center of the city.

The Netherlands maintains about 1,100 troops in southern Iraq as part of the U.S.-led coalition. The Dutch withdrew most of their diplomats in October because of deteriorating security and maintain a staff of five Dutch nationals in Baghdad, none of whom was in the building when it was attacked, the Dutch Foreign Ministry said.

Coalition officials are bracing for trouble during the four-day Eid al-Adha, or Feast of Sacrifice, which begins Sunday. The feast commemorates the Quranic account of God allowing the patriarch Abraham to sacrifice a sheep instead of his son Ismail. The Old Testament account says another son, Isaac, was spared.

In October, insurgents marked the beginning of the Islamic month of fasting, Ramadan, with a series of bloody strikes, including a rocket barrage on the Rasheed Hotel, vehicle bombings against the international Red Cross and the Nov. 12 suicide attack in Nasiriyah that killed 26 people, most of them Italian paramilitary police.

“We have done some intelligence-gathering for the near term during the Eid period, and we are fully prepared to deal with any insurgency,” Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations for the coalition, said Friday. He did not elaborate.

In a briefing for reporters, Kimmitt also said that during the past week, there were an average of 18 engagements each day between coalition and insurgent forces – roughly the same as in recent weeks but down from a spike of about 50 daily clashes in November.

So far this month, 34 U.S. soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, down from the 68 combat fatalities in November but more than the 25 battle deaths suffered in December.

In Mosul, residents said U.S. troops searching for three soldiers missing since last weekend came under rocket-propelled grenade fire Friday. There were no U.S. casualties. The U.S. command in Baghdad said it had no information on the report.

One of the missing soldiers disappeared Sunday when a patrol boat capsized in the Tigris River. A OH-58D Kiowa helicopter searching for that soldier crashed into the river soon afterward, and the two pilots were also missing.

Also in Mosul, an Iraqi civil defense trooper was killed and seven fellow corpsmen wounded in a drive-by shooting, according to 1st Lt. Khadir Abdullah Abed.

In other incidents, Iraqi officials said a car bomb on a major oil route in the north was defused. Iraqi police killed an attacker after gunmen opened fire Friday at a checkpoint south of Kirkuk.

The car was discovered late Thursday on the al-Hawija bridge, 150 miles north of Baghdad, on a route used by coalition forces and oil tankers transporting crude from the northern oil fields in Kirkuk to Iraq’s biggest refinery in Beiji, Kirkuk police chief Gen. Turhan Youssef said.

Youssef said Iraqi police found the car and informed coalition forces, who defused the bomb. Later, four people were arrested for suspected involvement, he said.

South of Kirkuk, six gunmen opened fire Friday on a checkpoint of the Iraqi Civil Defense Forces in Salman Beg. One attacker was killed and another injured in retaliatory fire, said Gen. Anwar Amin, the ICDC chief in Kirkuk.

Despite the violence, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday a U.N. team may leave for Iraq in a few days to assess the possibility of holding early legislative elections. Annan said this week he would send the team if the U.S.-led coalition could provide adequate security.

“The coalition has indicated to me, has promised us, it will do its utmost to protect the team that will work in Iraq,” Annan told reporters in Brussels, Belgium.

Annan pulled U.N. international staff out of Iraq last year after attacks on its offices, including a devastating vehicle bomb in August that killed 22 people.

U.S. officials fear early elections could lead to greater violence. Instead they want members of a new legislature to be named in regional caucuses. The legislature would in turn choose a new government to take power by July 1, formally ending the U.S.-led occupation.

The United States hopes that the United Nations can convince an influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, that early elections are not feasible.