BAGHDAD (AFP) - Two suicide bomb attacks directed at elite Iraqi police units killed at least 19 people and wounded more than 50, underscoring Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's message to parliament leaders that "the tree of liberty will be watered with blood."
At least 13 other people died in a series of attacks north of Baghdad, and a hospital in northern Mosul said it had received 12 unidentified bodies in the past 24 hours, most of them shot in the head.
In Hilla, south of Baghdad, eight policemen died and 36 people were wounded when two men strapped with explosives blew themselves up at in a restaurant near a base of the Iraqi police rapid-reaction force, police said.
Five of those wounded were in serious condition, said Dr Saad al Rubiya of the Hilla General Hospital.
The day began in an equally grim way, when a similar attack by a suicide bomber hit a checkpoint near the interior ministry's elite commando headquarters in Baghdad, killing 11 and wounding 22.
Most of the casualties were young recruits waiting to join, according to medical and security sources.
Jaafari, in an address to leaders of the parliament's Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, said: "The Iraqi nation is giving its dearest and its blood to defend humanity.
"Let the whole world and the countries of the region know that it is a battle of values and principles and not a matter of resistance and occupation."
He referred to Iraqi insurgent claims of resisting US-led occupation forces.
"Iraqis are battling terror on behalf of the whole world," the prime minister added, warning that "car bombs can be exported everywhere."
The attack on the commando base in Baghdad was the third since October, including one on January 4 that almost destroyed it, leaving 10 dead and 56 wounded.
Iraqi policemen guard two suspected insurgents
©AFP - Qassem Zein
Industry and Mineral Resources Minister Osama al-Najafi escaped an attack by gunmen on his convoy late Saturday that left four guards wounded.
With blows to Iraq's security forces a daily occurance, Jaafari said US-led troops should not leave Iraq until the country was ready to stand on its own.
"We look forward to multinational forces leaving but the timing must take into account national interests and not be dictated by terrorists," he said. "The timing must be Iraqi."
US President George W. Bush reaffirmed Saturday his determination to keep US troops in Iraq even though opinion polls show more than half of Americans now believe it was a mistake to launch the war.
"We know that the best way to honour the lives that have been given in this struggle is to complete the mission, so we will stay in the fight until the fight is won," Bush repeated in his weekly radio address.
His comments came amid growing demands from Democrats and some Republicans to come up with a strategy to begin pulling out the roughly 140,000 US troops currently in Iraq.
A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll showed 53 percent of Americans now believed the war was not worth fighting.
Another growing threat to America's mission is that of an Iraqi civil war.
Hundreds of Shiites in the shrine city of Najaf beat their chests, slapped their faces and chanted anti-Sunni slogans Saturday as they mourned the killing of Kamaleddin al-Ghuraifi, a senior aide to the Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
"People from the triangle slaughter my brothers," they chanted, in reference to a Sunni Arab-dominated area south of Baghdad that Iraqis call the Triangle of Death bcause of the number of attacks on Shiites.
Ghuraifi's killing was followed by the kidnapping of a Sunni cleric.
In another move that could stoke tension, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani demanded that Kurds be allowed back to the disputed city of Kirkuk, and Arabs sent there during the former regime's Arabisation drive resettled in their original homes.
"Jaafari's government must implement this immediately," Talabani told reporters during a visit to his native Kurdistan region in northern Iraq.
Elsewhere, a doctor who participated in seizing hostages and interrogating them has been captured by Iraqi forces, the US military said.
"Security forces captured Safa Ali Chiad Mashoul, aka (also known as) Doctor Moshen and Abu Saif, during a raid in the Baghdad area on June 21," a statement said.
But US forces released Mohammed Tabtabai Hakim, an aide to Moqtada Sadr who had been arrested and imprisoned more than a year ago during a bloody rebellion led by the radical Shiite cleric, a member of Sadr's movement said.