Baghdad bombs kill 26 British helicopters crash

Up to 26 people were killed and 70 wounded in bomb attacks in three mainly Shi'ite districts of Baghdad yesterday, police said, and two British military personnel died when two helicopters crashed north of the city.

The Britons died and another five were injured when the Puma transport helicopters crashed near a large US air base in Taji, 20 km from Baghdad. It appeared the helicopters may have collided in mid-air, the US military said.

Two car bombs earlier yesterday killed 15 people and wounded 50 more in the al-Shurta al-Rabeia neighbourhood in southwest Baghdad. The first was detonated in a market, followed seconds later by another at a nearby intersection, police said.

They said mortar rounds also landed in the area in an apparently coordinated attack.

Twisted metal littered the market, television footage showed. Several cars were damaged in the explosion. In the Kadhimiya district in the northwest of the capital, a police source said a suicide bomber wearing a belt packed with explosives killed six people and wounded 11 in a small bus. Another police source put the death toll at three.

In Karrada in central Baghdad, a car bomb aimed at a police patrol killed five people and wounded another 10 in a blast that rattled windows hundreds of metres away, police said.

A two-month-old, US-backed security crackdown in Baghdad seen as the last-ditch attempt to avoid Iraq from sliding into all-out civil war has reduced the number of targeted killings. But US and Iraqi commanders still find car and suicide bombers hard to stop.

Meanwhile the political movement of fiery Iraqi Shi'ite cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr said yesterday it will withdraw from the government todayto press its demand for a timetable for a US troop withdrawal.

Officials from the movement, which holds six ministries and a quarter of the parliamentary seats in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite Alliance, said the formal announcement would be made on Monday at a news conference.

The move is unlikely to bring down the government, but it could create tensions in Mr Maliki's fractious, Shi'ite-led government of national unity at a time when it is trying to heal deep sectarian divisions.