Nov.,17,2003(NYTimes.com)OSUL, Iraq¡ªAn Arab television station broadcast a new audiotape today that it said had been recorded by the deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in which he mixed invective against Israel, calls for holy war and curses on American and other foreign occupation troops in Iraq.

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If the new tape broadcast by the satellite station Al Arabiya in Dubai proved genuine, it would the first message from Mr. Hussein to be broadcast in two months, revealing a belligerent conviction on his part that Iraqis would want him back seven months after he fled before American invasion forces.

In the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where Mr. Hussein's now-banned Baath Party had deep roots and former army generals were elected to run the city after the war, American military officials said they were still investigating whether ground fire contributed to the deadly crash of two Black Hawk helicopters here on Saturday.

Seventeen soldiers were killed and five wounded in the crash, all from the 101st Airborne Division. The military withdrew an earlier statement that one soldier was missing, saying that all on board the two helicopters had been accounted for.

Attacks on American troops in Mosul have intensified in the past weeks. Five soldiers were reported wounded when a roadside bomb exploded under their convoy near the city today, although the city remains relatively calm compared to other Sunni-dominated cities closer to Baghdad.

American forces continued their new strategy of using heavier firepower on suspected guerrilla bases and aggressive roundups of weapons in Baghdad and other cities.

Troops backed by armored vehicles and helicopters sealed off a 20-block area in the capital while they searched Iraqi cars and trucks, and explosions were heard later in the evening in Baghdad that military officials suggested were bombings of suspected insurgent hideouts.

Also today, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division said troops fired a satellite-guided missile, containing a 500-pound warhead, at a suspected training base for training rebel fighters near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. The Army did not provide information on casualties from the strike.

In interviews on television news programs today, the American administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, maintained that the persistent attacks on occupation troops were limited in scale and effect.

"Ninety-five percent of these attacks on the coalition forces are taking place in a very small part of the country," he said on Fox News. "They are being conducted by a few thousand men, at most. And they pose no strategic threat to our operations here."

Mr. Bremer also sought to dispel any impression that the occupying powers would give up control over the political process in the coming months as Iraqi leaders prepare for independence.

The Bush administration has agreed to an Iraqi demand for sovereignty before the country has a constitution and holds national elections.

The accord, announced on Saturday, promised independence by July provided the Iraqi Governing Council adopts a set of basic governing principles, creates a national assembly and forms a provisional government. The drafting of a constitution and elections would take place later.

Mr. Bremer said the occupation authority would make sure that the governing principles, what he called an interim constitution, include guarantees of equality, an independent judiciary and other civil liberties similar to those in the Bill of Rights.

"They will be in the interim constitution because we are going to be involved in drafting it," he said in an interview on the ABC News program "This Week."

In the newest taped message, a voice that sounded like Mr. Hussein's condemned the Iraqi political leaders who have been working with Mr. Bremer, many of them former exiles who opposed Mr. Hussein for decades and supported the invasion that drove him from power last April.

The voice called for the killing of "those who are installed by foreign armies," a clear reference to the Iraqi leadership. He spoke of them jeeringly, calling them insignificant figures who could not "walk in the streets of Baghdad or any other Iraqi city."

A number of people working in the interim government, from judges to police officers to a member of the Governing Council, have been assassinated over the past few months.

An editor at Al Arabiya, which broadcast the tape, told the Reuters news agency that someone called and transmitted the recording over the telephone. The station put it on the air a few minutes later, the editor said.

The message appeared to have been recorded recently since it referred to a trip by members of the Iraqi council to neighboring countries that began today.

As have previous tapes from Mr. Hussein, the voice in latest recording railed against Britain and the United States and promised that they would be driven from Iraq in humiliation.

"They said, and they imagined and made the world imagine, they were going on a picnic, that they were going to destroy weapons of mass destruction as a cover for their crime of implanting Zionism in the Arab world," the speaker said.

The voice also called on Iraqis to restore power to Mr. Hussein and his Baath Party, "the same individuals that people trusted for decades." The Baath Party ruled Iraq 35 years. In the seven months since its fall, Iraqis have murdered hundreds of Baath officials to take revenge for what they say were Mr. Hussein's mass executions and tyranny.

In Washington, President Bush dismissed the tape, which he said he had not yet heard, as "the same old stuff."

"It's propaganda," he said, "and we're not leaving until the job is done."