IRAQ: A wave of bomb attacks and shootings swept Iraq from north to south yesterday, killing up to 60 people despite a massive security operation in the capital and appeals from Shia prime minister Nouri Maliki for an end to sectarian fighting.
Mr Maliki insisted bloodshed in Iraq was decreasing and that his government was making progress in efforts to combat sectarian clashes between Shias and Sunnis and attacks by insurgents.
A group of assailants in three cars raked an open-air market with gunfire killing at least 12 people and wounding 25 others, police said.
The gunmen fired indiscriminately at throngs of people at the main market of Khalis, a mostly Shia town, 80 kilometres north of Baghdad.
The US military command said two US soldiers were killed - one by small arms fire in eastern Baghdad yesterday afternoon, and the other on Saturday night when the vehicle he was travelling in was hit by a roadside bomb southeast of the capital. In Baghdad, a bomb in a minibus exploded outside the Palestine Hotel, killing nine people and wounding 16, while a car bomb outside the offices of a government-run newspaper left three dead and at least 29 wounded, police and witnesses said.
Two suicide car bombings in the northern city of Kirkuk - one of which targeted the house of a cousin of Iraq's president Jalal Talabani - killed nine people and wounded 22 hours after an earlier suicide car bomb killed one person and wounded 16.
In Basra, Iraq's second largest city, a motorcycle bomb at an open-air market killed four people and wounded 15, the governor's office said.
Earlier in the day, another six people were killed when a bomb exploded in the town of al-Khalis, on the outskirts of Baqouba, north of Baghdad.
Drive-by shootings also killed one person in Mosul and another three in Dujail.