BAGHDAD, Jan 1: Iraq's insurgency began the new year by claiming the lives of at least seven Iraqis and one US marine, with elections less than a month away and no end in sight to the violence.

At the end of a tumultuous year, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi gave a televised address to Iraqis, telling them that coming months would be crucial for Iraq, with national elections set for Jan 30.

"The new year will be decisive in the history of our nation and its future," said the premier in a message aired on state-owned television Al-Iraqi.

A loud explosion shook central Baghdad on Saturday afternoon, rattling windows, but there was no word on what caused the blast in the capital, regularly convulsed by mortar, rocket and bomb blasts.

Two beheaded corpses were found in a western Baghdad neighbourhood, the interior ministry said, while one civilian was killed and two wounded in a roadside bombing in the south of the capital, medics and witnesses said.

A video posted on the Internet showed the purported execution of five national guards in the western city of Ramadi by militants linked to Al Qaeda's chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The footage showed five men in civilian clothes being shot in the back after one of five hooded gunmen read a statement announcing their execution.

In a somber beginning to the New Year, a convoy of ambulances drove through western Baghdad with their sirens silent with one bearing the body of an ambulance driver killed Friday by a stray bullet.

Sabih Katta was on Baghdad's infamous Haifa street picking up Iraqis wounded in a shoot-out when he was shot, his mourning colleagues told AFP Saturday.

He had already whisked three wounded children to safety and had returned to the perilous street to pick up more when he was killed.

Violence continued in the Sunni Muslim heartland north and west of Baghdad, a haven for former regime loyalists, Islamists and criminals said to be driving the insurgency forward.-AFP