US appealed to allies for more soldiers following the announced withdrawal of Spanish, Honduran and Dominican Republic troops

BAGHDAD (AFP) — At least 39 Iraqis and seven US soldiers were killed in violence across Iraq on Saturday as the United States raised the alarm over troop shortages in the lead-up to the June 30 handover of power.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell appealed to US allies for more soldiers following the announced withdrawal of Spanish, Honduran and Dominican Republic troops during the bloodiest month for coalition forces in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad a year ago.

Central Command head, General John Abizaid, told The New York Times that the security situation was liable to worsen as the deadline for returning sovereignty to Iraq approached and that more US troops could be needed.

In Paris, the top UN envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Ibrahimi, expressed confidence that an interim government could be formed in Iraq by the scheduled handover of power, but warned the task would not be easy.

Fourteen Iraqis were killed and 36 wounded in four explosions in Baghdad's Shiite Muslim slum of Sadr City, according to hospital records.

The explosions rocked a chicken market and Al Habibia and Al Shawader neighbourhoods, but it was not immediately clear what caused them.

A US military official said the blasts might have involved "mortars or missiles fired by the Mehdi Army itself," referring to the militia of wanted Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, who is holed up in the holy city of Najaf.

AFP correspondents at the scene saw burnt and bullet-ridden cars and angry residents claiming US planes fired missiles on the areas.

Sadr, wanted for the alleged murder of a rival cleric, warned Friday that his supporters would carry out suicide attacks against the coalition if US troops entered Najaf or other holy cities.

Another 14 Iraqis were killed, including a child, and 11 wounded when their bus was hit by a roadside bomb near Iskandariyah, 50 kilometres south of Baghdad, hospital sources said.

An Iraqi civilian was also burnt alive in his vehicle after it came under fire near a coalition base in the holy Shiite city of Najaf early Saturday.

In another incident, four Iraqi policemen were killed when a booby-trapped car exploded near a US military base in the northern city of Tikrit. Twelve policemen and four civilians were wounded in the attack, police said.

Five US soldiers were killed and six wounded, three of them critically, in a rocket attack on a coalition base near Taji, just north of Baghdad.

Another two US soldiers were killed and one injured when insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at their convoy near the southern city of Kut.

A US 1st Infantry Division soldier was also killed Friday when his convoy was hit by a roadside bomb near Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Around 718 US troops have now died since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March last year, including more than 500 killed in action, most in fighting with insurgents following the rapid overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

No reliable figures for total Iraqi casualties are available, but a US commander said this month the figure was more than 700 in April alone, when Shiite Muslim militias opened a second front to the south of Baghdad in addition to the long-standing Sunni insurgency to the west and north.

Five insurgents who were preparing an ambush near the Shiite holy city of Karbala were killed by a Polish patrol early Saturday, a spokesman for the Polish contingent said.

Meanwhile, in the Sunni bastion of Fallujah, a two-year-old child was killed and six more people wounded when shelling and gunfire hit their house. US Brigadier General Mark Kimmit, deputy operations director for the US-led coalition, said US Marines in the town west of Baghdad were being prepared to go back on the offensive unless the truce there was honoured.

"We will continue to talk... (but) our patience is not eternal. The coalition is prepared to act," in reaction to regular breaches of the ceasefire, he said.

The Pentagon has already extended by 90 days the tours of 20,000 soldiers and offered to find new troops to keep the deployment at 135,000, if the military deems it necessary.

The New York Times said General Abizaid gave the clearest indication yet that he would ask for those troops.

"If the situation stays about like it is, I will certainly ask that those forces be replaced," the paper quotes him as saying. "We're going to make sure we have the right forces in place to do the job that needs to be done."

The general also said it was possible that he would request an increase beyond the 135,000 troops, if other nations withdrew their troops and if the training of most Iraqi security forces was not completed in time.

The US-led coalition has sought to boost the ranks of the new Iraqi army by allowing former officers of the banned Baath Party to join, significantly softening a policy of "debaathification" announced last year.

French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said on Saturday that France was prepared to train Iraqi security forces once sovereignty was returned to Iraq under UN control.

In British-patrolled Basra, three Iraqis suspected of having a hand in deadly suicide attacks were arrested. Suicide car bombings in Basra and nearby Zubair killed 74 people and wounded 160 others this week.

"We believe these three Iraqis are linked to the attacks," Captain Jassem Darragi, a police intelligence official in Basra, told AFP, adding that they were arrested Friday with 3.5 tonnes of explosives in their truck.

Meanwhile, in Washington, top finance officials from the Group of Seven industrialised countries called on other nations to help ease the debt burdens of Iraq, as well as Afghanistan.

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