February 06, 2007	Tuesday	Muharram 17, 1428

BAGHDAD, Feb 5: Three car bombs killed 24 people and wounded scores here on Monday as war-weary residents awaited the start of a sweeping US-Iraqi crackdown on sectarian violence in the city.

In Washington, US President George W. Bush asked a Democrat-run Congress to approve new military spending of $700 billion – much of it for the Iraq war – as he unveiled a $2.9 trillion budget request for fiscal 2008. He warned that even more spending for Iraq could be needed.

“Our priority is to protect the American people. And our priority is to make sure our troops have what it takes to do their jobs,” Bush told reporters at a meeting of his Cabinet.

In the worst blast on Monday, a car bomb targeting a petrol station in the religiously mixed southern neighbourhood of Saidiya killed 10 people and wounded 62, while eight people were killed and 40 wounded when a car bomb exploded in a garage.

A car bomb exploded near a children’s hospital in Andalus Square in central Baghdad, killing six and wounding nine.

The city is on edge as residents, exhausted by four years of war, look for signs the security sweep promised by Shia Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki early in January has begun.

The US military said a command centre in Baghdad that will oversee the offensive would become operational in the next few days. US officers had said on Sunday it would be activated on Monday and the operation would begin “soon thereafter”.

The only unusual activity on Monday appeared to be in the southern Doura district, where a convoy of 12 US Humvees and four Abrams tanks was seen heading into central Baghdad, but it was not immediately clear if it was related to the planned push.

US military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver said the Baghdad command centre, to be headed by an Iraqi general, was manned but “not yet up and running”. “It’ll take a few days to get things organised,” he said.

A US general urged Iraqis on Sunday to be patient, saying it would take some time for additional Iraqi and US forces to be deployed in the capital, epicentre of the sectarian violence.

Police said fighting erupted in Adhamiya on Monday after militants attacked the Sunni district in northern Baghdad. They gave no casualty figure, but 15 people were killed there in a mortar barrage on Sunday.

In Amil, a religiously mixed area of Baghdad, gunmen in police commando uniforms dragged people from their homes in Janabiyeen, a Sunni enclave that is home to members of the Janabiyeen tribe, and set at least five houses ablaze, witnesses said.

“I can see eight bodies, including an old man and two teenagers. No one can retrieve them because there are snipers on the roofs of some houses,” said one resident.

He said the gunmen retreated when a US force of Abrams tanks and Stryker armoured vehicles arrived on the scene.Residents were warned by loudhailer that anyone seen with a gun would be shot.

Maliki’s Baghdad security plan is seen as a last-ditch effort to quell soaring sectarian violence between majority Shias and once dominant Sunni Arabs that has claimed 1,000 lives across Iraq in the last week.—Reuters