Violence flares in Iraq, militants urged to surrender (Roundup)

Jun 25, 2008, 14:28 GMT

Baghdad - Ninety Iraqi civilians were wounded by a car bomb blast in Mosul, northern Iraq, while three US soldiers and an interpreter were killed in an attack in the same restive province of Nineveh, US military statements said Wednesday.

The three soldiers and the interpreter were killed in 'an improvised explosive device attack' in the province on Tuesday evening, the US military said.

The attack brings the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq this week to seven. At least 25 US soldiers have bee killed so far in June.

The killing of the three soldiers came shortly after two other soldiers, two US government employees and six Iraqis were killed in a bomb blast at a council meeting in Baghdad's Sadr City district, the bastion of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia.

In Mosul, the capital of Nineveh, 90 civilians were injured in the car bomb attack which the statement blamed on the al-Qaeda in Iraq group.

In another incident, five people from the same family were killed on Wednesday in a US airstrike on their home in a town near Tikrit, 170 kilometres north of Baghdad, witnesses told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa.

The US airstrike killed an Iraqi man, his wife and three children, all of whom were aged under 12, the witnesses said. Two people in a nearby house were also injured.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki gave Shiite militants in the southern Maysan province a week to surrender.

The deadline for armed groups to surrender starts from Wednesday, the spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, Mohamed al-Askari said.

Iraqi troops launched a crackdown nearly a week ago in Amarah, the capital of Maysan, targeting Shiite militants loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

The operation is the fourth of its kind this year in which al- Maliki sent troops to provinces to clear them of Shiite or Sunni insurgents.

Basra, Sadr City and Mosul have been the sites of major security offensives.