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WASHINGTON, Wednesday (Reuters) A group of about 600 U.S. military families, upset about the living conditions of soldiers in Iraq, are launching a campaign asking their relatives to urge members of Congress and President George W. Bush to bring the troops home.

"We're growing more and more disturbed about the conditions that are developing. Our concerns are both for our troops and the people in Iraq," said Nancy Lessin, a founder of Families Speak Out, formed last fall to oppose the war in Iraq.

Susan Schuman, whose son Justin is in the Massachusetts National Guard deployed to Samarra, Iraq, said he shares a small room in a former Iraqi police barracks with five other men. "They are rationed to 2 liters of water a day and it's 125 degrees (52 degrees C), they haven't had anything but MREs (Meals Ready to Eat)," she told Reuters, adding that uncertainty about when the troops would come home was "most disheartening."

Organizers hope to take advantage of Congress' summer recess to voice their concerns to lawmakers in their home states. "The idea is not to confront but say look, 'what is going on?'" said Dennis O'Neil, a member of Veterans for Peace, another group involved in the campaign. "This war was supposed to be quick."

Lessin, whose stepson is a Marine who was in the Gulf until late May, told Reuters the group plans a campaign of protests and demonstrations starting on Wednesday and aims to raise public awareness of the number of soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq. Another U.S. soldier was killed and two were injured on Tuesday in a bomb attack west of Baghdad. The latest casualties brought to 57 the number of troops killed in guerrilla attacks since the beginning of May.

A spokesman for U.S. Central Command said that as of Monday, 167 U.S. soldiers had died and 1,006 soldiers were injured as a result of hostile action in Iraq. He told Reuters that 91 other soldiers had died from non-hostile actions and 277 others were wounded.

Meanwhile in the northern city of Mosul, a U.S. Humvee was destroyed in a blast and witnesses said four casualties were taken away. The U.S. Army said it had no details. U.S. forces occupying Iraq come under daily attack, and Washington says die-hard Saddam Hussein loyalists and some foreign militants are behind the guerrilla campaign.

Adel Murad, a spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), told Reuters in Baghdad that Kurdish Peshmerga militiamen had rounded up 50 people near the Iranian border - some of them members of the shadowy Ansar al-Islam group, which Washington has linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

Paul Bremer, Iraq's U.S. governor, told a news conference that Ansar al-Islam was one of the groups under suspicion for a truck bomb attack on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad last week that killed at least 17 people and wounded scores.

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