At least 20 killed as car bomb rips through Iraq port

BAGHDAD, Tuesday (AFP, Reuters) At least 20 people were killed when a car bomb tore through a crowded market in the southern Iraqi port city of Basra late Monday, security sources said.

"Twenty people, mostly civilians, were killed and 45 wounded in the car bomb attack in a crowded market in Basra," an interior ministry source said, adding that the toll was expected to climb. The bomb exploded as a police patrol passed, tearing into a crowded market near a newly opened shopping mall and destroying at least four cars, an AFP photographer said.

On September 13, four Iraqi private security guards were killed and two wounded in a roadside bombing outside Basra, the biggest city in southern Iraq, in the last attack to hit the relatively quiet region.

In recent weeks there has been an increase in attacks in the south, where the mainly Shiite population are generally less hostile to the presence of US-led troops than Sunni Arabs in north-central Iraq.

On September 7, four American guards escorting a US diplomatic convoy were killed in a bombing, while three British soldiers were also killed in two separate blasts that week.Monday's bombing struck as the US military announced the deaths of seven more American troops, bringing US military losses in Iraq since the 2003 invasion to at least 2,021 according to an AFP tally.

Meanwhile Iraq asked the U.N. Security Council to let a U.S.-led multinational force remain in Iraq for another year, acknowledging its own troops could not yet assure national security.

The request came in a letter to the 15-nation council from Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. "This means that basically the mandate and the status of the multinational force will be discussed in the coming weeks so that from January 1, 2006, we will have a consistent military presence in Iraq as happened in the past," Mihai-Razvan Ungureanu, the foreign minister of Romania, the Security Council president for October, told reporters.

The multinational force's current mandate expires at the end of this year, under a resolution approved by the council in June 2004, when the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority turned over Iraq's administration to an interim government.