A spate of car bombs and mortar attacks killed 70 people in Iraq, police and local officials said today, while the US military reported eight of its soldiers killed in the past two days.
One British soldiers was also killed in the southern city of Basra in fierce fighting with militants overnight, during raids that a military spokesman described as the biggest British operation in Iraq this year.
The fresh violence follows a lull in Iraq, where tens of thousands of US and Iraqi troops are on the offensive against insurgents in a bid to halt a slide into sectarian civil war.
Rising US casualties have put US President George W. Bush under mounting pressure from opposition Democrats and from some senior figures in his own Republican Party to justify his strategy of ordering 28,000 more troops to Iraq. There are now 157,000 US military personnel in Iraq.
A truck bomb ripped through an outdoor market in the northern town of Tuz Khurmato today while many people were shopping, killing 30 people and wounding 90, police said. The bomb levelled shops and small houses, and police said they feared the death toll could rise.
A suicide car bomber killed six people including five Iraqi soldiers when he drove into a military checkpoint in east Baghdad, an army spokesman said. The attack also wounded 24 people, including 18 soldiers.
Yesterday evening, a suicide car bomber killed 22 people and wounded 17 others when he drove his vehicle into a group of Shia Kurds near Iraq's border with Iran.
The village is in Diyala province, where US and Iraqi forces last month launched an offensive against Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda.
The US military said roadside bombs killed six soldiers in and around Baghdad, five yesterday and one on Thursday. It said two Marines were killed in combat in Anbar province on Thursday.
A British soldier was killed in Basra during an operation involving 1,000 British troops to flush out suspected militants, the military said. Three others were wounded.
Six militiamen loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were killed in clashes with US soldiers in the southern Iraqi city of Diwaniya early today.
Also overnight, a mortar bomb killed seven members of one family as they slept on their roof in the Sunni neighbourhood of Fadhil in central Baghdad, police said. They included a couple and their four children, aged nine to 17. Electricity blackouts have stopped air conditioners from working, so many Iraqis find it cooler to sleep on roofs.
The April-June period was the deadliest three months for US troops since the March 2003 US-led invasion. So far this month, 22 soldiers have been killed, half of them in Baghdad.
More than 150 British soldiers have been killed in Iraq since 2003. The number of British troops in Iraq was recently cut to about 5,500 from 7,000.