Sixteen Iraqis died and 90 were wounded in two separate car bombings in Baghdad’s Al Amin neighbourhood — one near a gas station and the other in a market — an interior ministry official said. “Most of the casualties were from the blast in the market,” the official said. The other car bomb blew up a parked gas tanker, setting off a huge fireball.

The US military announced yesterday that five soldiers had died a day earlier in separate rebel attacks. Three soldiers were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad. The fourth succumbed to wounds suffered when his unit came under small-arms fire in the southwest of the capital. A marine also died of his wounds after coming under small-arms fire near the former rebel bastion town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. The latest fatalities take the death toll of US military personnel in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 2,247.