Baghdad: A spate of car bombs and mortar attacks killed 70 people in Iraq, police and local officials said on Saturday, while the US military reported eight of its soldiers killed in the past two days.
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.
A truck bomb ripped through an outdoor market in the northern town of Tuz Khurmato on Saturday while many people were shopping, killing 30 people and wounding 90, police said.
The bomb leveled 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 on Saturday when he drove into a military checkpoint in east Baghdad, an army spokesman said. The attack also wounded 24 people, including 18 soldiers.
On Friday evening, a suicide car bomber killed 22 people and wounded 17 others when he drove his vehicle into a group of Shi'ite Kurds near Iraq's border with Iran. The victims were returning from a funeral, a local official said.
The US military said roadside bombs killed six soldiers in and around Baghdad, five on Friday and one on Thursday. It said two Marines were killed in combat in Anbar province on Thursday.
One British soldier was killed in the southern city of Basra in fierce fighting with militants overnight, during raids involving 1,000 troops that a military spokesman described as the biggest British operation in Iraq this year.
Also overnight, a mortar bomb killed seven members of one family as they slept on their roof in the Sunni neighborhood 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.
