Car bombs kill more than 60 near Baghdad

BAGHDAD - Three car bombs tore through busy streets in a mixed Shi'ite and Sunni town north of Baghdad, killing more than 60 people and wounding dozens in the latest apparent sectarian attack to strike Iraq.

Hours earlier, five US troops were killed in one of the deadliest bombings in weeks near Ramadi, a bastion of Sunni Arab insurgency; the US commander in Iraq told senators plans to cut troop numbers next year may be thwarted if things go awry in a constitutional referendum and election in the coming months.

Police sources said two bombs went off about 10 minutes apart in a Shi'ite neighbourhood of Balad, about 90km north of Baghdad, targeting a busy market and a nearby road at dusk, when streets would have been full.

A third bomb went off close by half an hour later in what looked like co-ordinated explosions in Balad, not far from a town where killings of Shi'ites in 1982 under Saddam Hussein are the grounds on which the former president faces trial next month.

Among the wounded in the follow-up blasts was Balad's police chief, one police source said.

Some of those injured were being brought to Baghdad for treatment as Balad's hospitals could not cope.

The attack is the latest by Sunni Arab insurgents to target the long oppressed majority Shi'ite Muslim population.

This week, five Shi'ite teachers were hauled out of a school in a town south of Baghdad and shot dead by gunmen, while last month more than 100 day labourers were killed by a suicide car bomber in the Shi'ite Kadhamiya district of Baghdad.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who heads al Qaeda in Iraq, one of the most feared militant groups, has pledged "all out war" on Iraq's Shi'ites in an apparent effort to provoke sectarian conflict and drive the country further into chaos.

Iraq's foremost Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has urged his followers not to respond to provocations by Sunni insurgents, but still there has been a wave of tit-for-tat sectarian killings across in the country.

This week, the bodies of 22 men, all believed to be Sunnis, were found blindfolded, bound and shot dead. Their bodies were dumped in a wasteland southeast of the capital. The Sunni community blamed the killings on Shi'ite militias, some of which have close links with parties in the U.S.-backed government.

- REUTERS