Three car bombs killed 24 people and wounded scores in Baghdad today as war-weary residents awaited the start of a sweeping US-Iraqi crackdown on sectarian violence in the city.
In Washington, US President George W. Bush asked a Democrat-run Congress to approve new military spending of $700 billion - much of it for the Iraq war - as he unveiled a $2.9 trillion budget request for fiscal 2008. He warned that even more spending for Iraq could be needed.
In the worst blast today, a car bomb targeting a petrol station in the religiously mixed southern neighbourhood of Saidiya killed 10 people and wounded 62, while eight people were killed and 40 wounded when a car bomb exploded in a garage.
A car bomb exploded near a children's hospital in Andalus Square in central Baghdad, killing six and wounding nine.
The city is on edge as residents, exhausted by four years of war, look for signs the security sweep promised by Shia Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki early in January has begun.
The US military said a command centre in Baghdad that will oversee the offensive would become operational in the next few days. US officers had said yesterday it would be activated on Monday and the operation would begin "soon thereafter".
Meanwhile a powerful Iraqi Shia leader said today that Iraqi officials want to see talks between Iran and the United States as a means of easing tensions in the region.
"A negotiation between Iran and America is really important. All the Iraqi authorities involved in Iraq are calling for this," Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who spent years in exile in Iran, was quoted by Iran's official IRNA news agency.
When he visited Tehran in March 2006, he also called for dialogue between the two foes.
That proposal initially won Iran's backing, but Tehran later said it had no need for such discussions. Mr Hakim was speaking after a meeting in Tehran with Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council.
The United States has said it is ready for talks with Iran if it first halts uranium enrichment because it fears Tehran wants to use it to make atomic warheads.
Iran, which insists it only wants to enrich uranium to make fuel for power stations, has rejected such a precondition.
Washington also accuses Iran of fuelling violence in the Iraq. Tehran dismisses the charge, blaming the United States for destabilising Iraq and for stoking tension between Shias, who form a majority in Iran and Iraq, and Sunnis.