BAGHDAD, Sept 17: At least eight people were killed on Friday when two suicide car bombs exploded in Baghdad as gun battles raged in a known hotspot here and 44 people died in US air strikes near Fallujah.

As the interim government struggled to quell the surging violence, Iraqi police, backed by national guard and US forces, launched a crackdown in the capital, arresting 63 people, including Syrians, Lebanese and Egyptians.

The action came a day after two Americans and a Briton were kidnapped from their smart Baghdad home, increasing fears among a jittery expatriate community. A suicide bomber rammed his car into a police vehicle and blew it up as an Iraqi police patrol was stopping people from crossing into the Baghdad trouble spot of Haifa Street, where gun battles raged in the morning.

"We were blocking the street, when I saw this American car. There was a young man wearing a red shirt inside. I told my men to stop this guy, but we couldn't, he was driving too fast," said policeman Ahmed Mohammed.

A health ministry official said five people were killed and 20 others wounded in the attack, most of them policemen. Doctors reported 27 people wounded. Pockets of fighting had flared in the morning after a driver tried to ram another explosives-rigged car into a checkpoint and the vehicle was blown up by gunfire, US military spokesman Major Philip Smith said.

The trouble spot, where fierce clashes on Sunday left 13 people dead, was sealed off and the US spokesman said a joint US-Iraqi operation was ongoing in the area "to deny terrorists the ability to operate".

The explosions came three days after a car bomb outside the capital's police headquarters left 49 people dead. On Thursday night, US planes hit Zoba village, south of Fallujah, demolishing 13 houses, in what the US military called a "precision strike on a terrorist compound" of suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al Zarqawi.

The health ministry said 44 people were killed and 27 wounded, and a doctor at the Fallujah general hospital said many of the victims were women and children. A religious leader, Sheikh Abdelghafur al Samarrai, lashed out at the US military for the bombings.

"If you have intelligence on the location of Zarqawi and his elements why don't you surround and capture them?" he asked during a Friday sermon in Baghdad. As many as 60 foreign fighters were killed in one strike on a "confirmed Abu Mussab Zarqawi terrorist meeting site", the US military said, although it was impossible to verify the claim.

An official at a Fallujah hospital said two Iraqi women were killed and eight others wounded in another raid on the city itself, where much of the hostage-taking that has plagued Iraq for six months is thought to be masterminded.

NATO MISSION: Against the backdrop of violence, agreement on expanding a NATO training mission in Iraq hit a last-minute snag notably due to French and Belgian reservations about details of the accord, NATO officials said. Paris backed UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's description of the invasion Iraq as "illegal". -AFP