BAGHDAD, Jan 18: Six car bombs killed at least 19 people across Baghdad on Thursday as Iraq’s prime minister urged the United States to give Iraqi forces more weapons and said he could bring security in three to six months if they did.

Three bombs in quick succession killed at least 10 people and wounded 30 in a wholesale vegetable market in the violent southern district of Dora, police said.

“There is no mercy any more, the people here just want to work,” Mohammed Ali Kazim, a vegetable seller, shouted angrily.

“They have followed us to this poor place. People here are Sunnis, Shias and Christians and they just want to live.” Earlier, a car bomb in Saadoun Street, a main commercial thoroughfare, killed four people and wounded 10. Two others killed two and three people respectively in the mainly Shia east of the city, one of them going off near a police station.

There has been a surge of violence this week as the Iraqi government prepares to launch a US-backed security crackdown in Baghdad, widely seen as a last chance to save Iraq from an all-out sectarian civil war.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has blamed the violence on Sunni Arab followers of Saddam Hussein angered by his execution. Iraqi officials have said they were worried that a failure of the latest security plan may also see the end of US support as President George W. Bush would be forced to change course.

Facing opposition in the Democrat-controlled Congress, Bush is also trying to shore up support within his own Republican party for his strategy to send about 21,500 extra US troops to Iraq to stabilise Baghdad and mainly Sunni Anbar province.

But Maliki, a Shia, told foreign newspapers in comments published on Thursday that Iraq’s need for US troops could diminish by the summer if the United States gave Iraqi security forces sufficient arms and other supplies.

“If we succeed in implementing the agreement between us to speed up the equipping and providing weapons to our military forces, I think that within three to six months our need for American troops will dramatically go down,” Britain’s Times quoted him as saying.

Asked about Maliki’s attitude to Bush’s new plan for Iraq, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said: “I think that the prime minister wanted to do this by himself, or have the Iraqis do this on their own. He wants to take the lead, he wants to show he's in charge, he wants to show his government can deliver,” Gates told reporters in Bahrain. “I think ... that his military and security advisers suggested to him that their own forces needed some help from the Americans. I think he probably wishes that weren’t so and so it really doesn’t surprise me that he has not embraced this fully.”—Reuters