Suicide car bomb kills 15 in Baghdad-police

BAGHDAD, Aug 1 (Reuters) A suicide car bomb killed 15 people and wounded 20 others in the mainly Shi'ite Karrada district of central Baghdad today, police said.

The bomb in a four-wheel drive vehicle went off in a bustling commercial area full of electronics stores and near a popular ice-cream shop.

Karrada, on the eastern side of the Tigris River, is normally one of the more stable areas in the Iraqi capital but has been hit by a string of bombs in the past 10 days.

A parked car bomb killed 25 people and wounded 115 last Thursday, three days after three separate bombs killed another 13 people in the same district.

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 in Iraq.

Operations have also been expanded in other parts of the country after Washington sent an extra 30,000 troops in an attempt to buy time for the Iraqi government to meet a series of political benchmarks aimed at promoting national reconciliation.

REUTERS AE PM1350