(Updates with Polish helicopter hit, paragraph 3) By Aseel Kami BAGHDAD, Oct 15 (Reuters) - Gunmen launched simultaneous mortar and machinegun attacks on two mainly Polish military bases in southern Iraq on Monday, after Shi'ite militants vowed to step up pressure on Polish soldiers to force them out. An official at a hospital in Diwaniya, 180 km (110 miles) south of Baghdad, said two children under the age of 10 had been killed in the mortar attack and three -- a 15-year-old and two 17-year-olds -- had been shot dead. A Polish helicopter was hit by machinegun fire during the attacks but managed to land safely, said Lieutenant-Colonel Wlodek Glogowski, spokesman for Polish forces in Iraq. Two Polish soldiers were slightly wounded in the clashes. On Sunday Reuters obtained a copy of a video in which two previously unknown Shi'ite groups claimed responsibility for attacks on Poland's ambassador and its embassy and warned Polish troops to leave Iraq "before you drown in its swamp". About 900 Polish troops, part of the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, are based in Qadisiya province to support the 8th Iraqi Army division and train Iraqi soldiers and police. In Monday's attack, gunmen fired mortars and machineguns at a base manned by Polish and Iraqi soldiers in Iskan, a southwestern neighbourhood of Diwaniya, the provincial capital, Glogowski said He said four civilians were killed and 17 wounded. They were hit by the attacking militants, not when troops returned fire, he said. Three gunmen had also been killed. It was not clear how the children became victims of the attack, but there are many homes near the base. A curfew was later imposed in the surrounding districts. A column of smoke rose from Iskan, where the base sits amid one-storey houses, while the rattle of sustained machinegun fire could be heard nearby. SHI'ITE MILITANTS WARN POLISH TROOPS Glogowski said militants also fired mortar rounds at Camp Echo, which is just south of Diwaniya and houses U.S. and other multinational forces and is under Polish command. There were no casualties in that attack. In the video obtained by Reuters Television, the Imam Hussein Brigades and Imam Moussa al-Kadhim Brigades said Poland had allied with the "devil" America to kill Iraqis and accused Polish troops of torturing detainees. Videos by Shi'ite militant groups claiming responsibility for attacks are rare and are more commonly issued by al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab groups. "We want to tell Poland that all its interests in Iraq will be targeted by our resistance, including the diplomats, companies and troops. We only exclude journalists," said one of four masked gunmen who appeared in the video. Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has vowed to keep Polish troops in southern Iraq despite the attack on the ambassador earlier this month. The ambassador was wounded in a triple bomb attack on his diplomatic convoy in Baghdad in which one Polish secret service officer and a passerby were killed. Five days later a car bomb killed two people near Poland's Baghdad embassy. Monday's attacks come days ahead of an Oct. 21 parliamentary election in Poland in which Kaczynski, a strong U.S. ally, faces a challenge from opposition parties who want to pull Polish troops out of Iraq. In a televised debate with his main rival on Friday, Kaczynski compared withdrawing the troops from Iraq to desertion. Diwaniya is in the Shi'ite, oil-rich south and has largely escaped the violence between Shi'ite and Sunni Arabs that has ravaged the rest of the country, but it has been a battleground in the past for rival Shi'ite groups. The Mehdi Army militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has a strong presence in Diwaniya, and in April it clashed with Iraqi and U.S. forces when it tried to take control of the city. Mehdi Army fighters have been lying low since Sadr announced in August that he was freezing the activities of the militia, increasingly seen as fragmented and outside his control, in order to reorganise it. (Additional reporting by Ross Colvin in Baghdad)
