Heavily armed insurgents battled US and Iraqi troops in the restive northern city of Mosul today where at least four policemen, including a top officer, and four militants were reported killed.
A suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives into a crowd of policemen watching a football match in Hadhar, a town 90 km (55 miles) south of Mosul, killing 10 people, including seven civilians. Twelve people were wounded.
In Baghdad, tens of thousands of supporters of radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr rallied against Israel's offensive in Lebanon in one of the biggest shows of solidarity with Lebanon's Shia Hizbollah group.
After the rally, gunmen opened fire on a convoy of Sadr supporters near Yusufiya south of Baghdad. The town is situated in the so-called Triangle of Death, an area known for frequent Sunni insurgent attacks. Police said 25 people had been wounded.
The fresh bloodletting came a day after the head of US Central Command, General John Abizaid, said Iraq was caught in the worst sectarian violence it had yet seen and faced the threat of civil war.
As is often the case in Iraq, accounts of the fighting in Mosul were confused and the US military offered only scant information on the gunbattles which police sources agreed lasted from about 6.30 a.m. (3 am Irish time) until just after midday.
A source in the city morgue said it had received 20 bodies from the fighting, including those of five policemen, but police sources said four policemen and four militants died during six hours of clashes that also drew in US and Iraqi troops.
"We have killed a number of them (insurgents) and burnt their cars. Now the west bank is 100 percent secured," Nineveh police chief General Wathiq al-Hamdani told state television, adding that the insurgents were members of al Qaeda