BAGHDAD, Feb 28: Attacks on Iraq’s Shiite majority, including a car bombing at a mosque, claimed the lives of 58 people and wounded 180 others on Tuesday, raising fears of a new round of sectarian violence across Iraq.

As insurgents unleashed a fresh assault on the country’s fragile ethnic and religious fabric, US President George W. Bush warned Iraq must choose between “chaos and unity”.

A car bomb blew up on Tuesday evening outside a mosque in Baghdad’s northeastern al-Hurriya neighbourhood, killed 21 people and wounding 43, a security official said.

The blast followed just hours after three bombs went off on Tuesday morning in quick succession in Shia areas in the capital, killing at least 30 people and wounding 130.

The new violence jolted feverish US and Iraqi efforts to restore stability to Iraq and comes amid stuttering efforts to resume talks on forming a national unity government by bringing Sunni groups into a Shiite-led coalition.

The Iraqi government said 379 people had been killed and 458 wounded in violence around the country since Wednesday’s bombing in Samarra.

In one of the morning Baghdad attacks, a suicide bomber wearing a explosives vest blew himself up next to a queue of people waiting to buy kerosene in Al-Amin, southeast Baghdad.

In the second, a car bomb exploded in the city’s southeastern district of Jadida, an interior ministry official said. Those two attacks killed 24 and wounded 112 people, he said.

Another six people were killed in a car bomb attack near a market in the central Karada district, he said, adding 18 others were wounded.

Five bodyguards of Lieutenant General Daham Radi al-Assal, advisor to Iraqi defence minister, were killed when a roadside bomb exploded against his convoy in eastern Baghdad, a defence ministry official said. Seven other bodyguards were also wounded.

In southern Iraq, two British soldiers were killed on Tuesday, the defence ministry in London said. A third soldier in the US-led multinational force was wounded in the incident near Amarra.

Iraqi police said a roadside bomb targeted a British patrol on the outskirts of the southern city.

The coordinated bomb attacks hit Baghdad just one day after the authorities lifted a daytime curfew and a vehicle ban in the capital.

In Washington, Bush expressed worry over the turbulent situation.

“The people of Iraq and their leaders must make a choice. The choice is chaos or unity,” Bush said.

The tomb of Hussein al-Majid, father of deposed leader Saddam Hussein, was bombed in the northern town of Tikrit.

—AFP