Suicide car bomb kills 15 in Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Aug 1 (Reuters) A suicide car bomb killed 15 people in a bustling commercial district close to a popular ice-cream parlour in central Baghdad today, police said, leaving bodies strewn in the street and setting cars ablaze.

The bomb in a four-wheel drive vehicle went off near a petrol station and electronics shops close to al-Hurriya Square in the predominantly Shi'ite Karrada district on the eastern side of the Tigris River.

Another 20 people were wounded, police said.

Reuters television pictures showed a line of cars that had been set on fire, while witnesses said the wounded and the bodies of the dead lay in the street. The bomb left a large crater in the middle of the road.

Separately, the US military said three of its soldiers had been killed and another six wounded by a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad yesterday.

Their deaths took the total of US soldiers killed in July to at least 77, still the lowest monthly toll for the US military in Iraq since last November and the lowest since the build-up of 30,000 extra US troops began in February.

Karrada is normally one of the safest areas in Baghdad though it has been hit by a string of bombs in the past 10 days.

A parked car bomb killed more than 50 people and wounded 115 last Thursday, three days after three separate bombs killed 13.

US and Iraqi forces have stepped up security operations in Baghdad since mid-February in an attempt to stem bombings, many of them blamed on al Qaeda, the Sunni Islamist group that US officials say is trying to spark a full-scale civil war.

MILITARY PUSH Operations have also been expanded in other parts of the country since the build-up of troops was completed in June, taking the total number of US forces in Iraq to 157,000.

The military push is an attempt to buy time for the Iraqi government to meet a series of political benchmarks aimed at curbing sectarian violence and promoting national reconciliation among majority Shi'ite and minority Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

But Maliki's stumbling government is virtually paralysed by infighting. The largest Sunni bloc in parliament, the Accordance Front, has threatened to pull out unless Maliki meets a list of demands, including a greater say in security matters.

That deadline was due to lapse today. Maliki's Shi'ite-led government has already been weakened by the withdrawal of fiery Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's political bloc, one of the biggest groups in parliament.

The government has so far made little progress on any of Washington's benchmarks. Parliament went into recess on Monday for a month after the government failed to present it with any of the laws, including a crucial revenue-sharing oil law.

That was seen as a worrying sign ahead of a watershed progress report due to be presented to Congress by US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and the commander of US forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, in mid-September.

US President George W Bush is under growing pressure from Democrats and from some within his own Republican Party to show progress in the unpopular war or begin drawing up a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops.

US military officials cautiously welcomed the drop in troops deaths in July as evidence that its new strategy was beginning to work. US troop casualties had spiked to more than 100 in the three previous months.

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