Sixty soldiers were hurt in Iraq attacks yesterday. One man halted a bloodbath, reports Jack Fairweather in Talaafar

Hundreds of American soldiers owe their lives to the prompt action of a 23-year-old sentry.

In the faint pre-dawn light Specialist James Ross saw a car, its headlights on, accelerate towards his guard tower at the entrance of the Talaafar military base, near Mosul.

The vehicle had already cleared the first line of defense, barreling over a coil of barbed wire 80 yards away and was heading straight down a corridor of crash barriers.

"I knew it wasn't one of our guys - it was either me or him," said Spc Ross, who began firing his machine-gun in a last-ditch attempt to stop the car entering the compound, where 300 soldiers were just waking.

Spc Ross, from Kentucky, fired almost 100 rounds before the car, pitted with bullet-holes, came to a stop. A second later, the vehicle blew up.

"I saw a blinding white light before I was thrown back inside the guard tower," he said. "After that everything was obscured by dust."

The force of the 1,000lb bomb threw a 10-ton concrete block against a school opposite the base and flattened 40 yards of protective wall.

Parts of the ceiling in the military base caved in and windows were blown out in a mile radius from the blast side. A nine-ft crater left by the suicide bomber was only 15 yards away from Spc Ross's guard tower and the base entrance.

The attack should have been devastating. But thanks to Spc Ross's timely shooting, and the compound's recently strengthened defensive wall, only five of the 54 soldiers wounded had serious injuries.

"I've had a lot of people come up to me today to thank me for saving their lives," said Spc Ross. "But I tell them I was doing my job. It's a miracle no one was killed."

Work had already begun yesterday evening on rebuilding damaged sections of the defensive wall and the crater had been filled in preparation for another possible attack.

Lt-Col Christopher Pease, battalion commander, said: "We've taken the worst the terrorists can throw at us but we don't know what they could do next."

Commanders at the base believe they were carefully selected for the suicide attack - the first of its kind on a US base - while defenses at the base were being rebuilt over the past week.

"Thank God we finished in time," said Lt-Col Pease.

The attack ended an apparent trend in recent weeks by terrorists to attack "soft targets".

A tightening of security at US army and government facilities in Iraq was thought to have left insurgents searching more widely afield in their efforts to disrupt the reconstruction process.

Ten days ago, 12 foreign contractors and diplomats were ambushed in separate roadside incidents. Last month 27 Italian military police were killed when a suicide bomber struck their poorly defended headquarters in the southern city of Nasiriyah.

But yesterday's full-frontal assault on an American base will leave commanders in little doubt that the US military presence remains the insurgents' top target.

The attack will also raise questions as to why the security situation in northern Iraq has deteriorated so dramatically in recent months. The area was once seen as a model of reconstruction compared with Baghdad and the troubled Sunni triangle.

Gen David Patreas, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, famously posted a list in the centre of the district capital, Mosul, of the things the US military had done to help the Iraqis.

In the Talaafar district alone, more than $3 million (£1.7 million) has been spent in the past eight months, on schools, clinics and police stations. But since October, attacks on coalition troops in the area have increased from a few a month to almost daily.

"We've done a whole lot of projects to help the people but we haven't eliminated the Ba'ath Party," said Lt-Col Pease. "They're the guys who are attacking us now."

As one officer said yesterday outside a shrapnel-scarred office: "We just painted the building four days ago. Now we're going to have to start all over again."