BAGHDAD (AFP) - At least five people were killed when a suicide car bomb struck central Baghdad after gunbattles in a known hotspot, as 44 people died in US air strikes near the insurgent bastion of Fallujah.
US-led local troops launched a crackdown Friday on lawless zones in the capital, a day after the kidnapping of two Americans and a Briton in the heart of Baghdad that increased fears among the jittery expatriate community.
The suicide bomber rammed an Iraqi police patrol passing through the Rashid commercial district and blew up his car, an interior ministry spokesman and police said.
"Five of my police colleagues were killed," said First Lieutenant Jafaar Hussein, his shirt drenched in blood.
"The suicide bomber was driving a Chevrolet Malibu. He smashed his car against the police vehicle," said Colonel Adnan (eds: correct) Abdul Rahman.
"Five people were killed and 20 others wounded in the attack, most of them policemen," an official from the health ministry in charge of centralising casualty tolls told AFP.
The official, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, warned that the toll could rise and was unable to confirm whether the suicide bomber was included in the count.
The usually teeming area was less crowded than usual due to the Muslim weekly day of rest in Iraq.
The explosion came three days after a car bomb outside the capital's police headquarters left 49 people dead and after gunbattles raged in the radical bastion of Haifa Street, on the other side of the Tigris River.
Pockets of fighting flared Friday after a driver tried to ram another explosives-rigged car into a Haifa Street checkpoint and the vehicle was blown up by gunfire, US military spokesman Major Philip Smith said.
The driver and possibly a second occupant of the car were killed, he added.
Helicopters hovered overhead and US armour rolled towards the site of the fighting and heavy machine-gun fire was heard up to four hours after the blast.
The trouble spot, where fierce clashes on Sunday left 13 people dead, was sealed off and the US spokesman said a joint US-Iraqi operation was ongoing in the area "to deny terrorists the ability to operate".
West of Baghdad, several air raids overnight hit the village of Zoba, just south of the notorious rebel bastion of Fallujah, demolishing 13 houses, in what the US military described as an attack on a "terrorist compound" of suspected Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.
The health ministry said 44 people were killed and 27 wounded, while a doctor at the Fallujah general hospital said many of the victims were women and children.
As many as 60 foreign fighters were killed in one strike on a "confirmed Abu Musab Zarqawi terrorist meeting site", the US military said, although it was impossible to independently verify the claim.
Fallujah hospital said two Iraqi women were killed and eight others wounded in another raid on the city itself, which is out of US military control and where much of the hostage-taking that has plagued Iraq for six months is thought to be masterminded.
The US military also reported several other operations in the surrounding Al-Anbar province against Zarqawi, Iraq's most-wanted man with a bounty of 25 million dollars on his head.
Elsewhere on Friday, six Iraqi national guards were wounded and an attacker was killed when a bomb exploded as their patrol passed north of Baquba, a guard spokesman said.
Against the backdrop of violence, nationals of governments which backed the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq as well as those of countries that did not have been ensnared in an escalating foreign kidnapping crisis.
On Thursday, two Americans and a Briton were snatched from their home in an upmarket Baghdad neighbourhood.
The operation, for which no one has yet claimed responsibility, was similar to one of two Italian aid workers and two Iraqis taken at gunpoint from their office in a quiet residential area of Baghdad earlier this month.
Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper, quoting non-Italian intelligence services, said the two Italians, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta had been taken by their captors to Fallujah.
More than 100 foreigners are thought to have been abducted in Iraq since April and more than 20 murdered, in a new insurgent tactic alongside the longstanding barrage of mortar and rocket-propelled grenade attacks and roadside bombings.
A dead man, possibly a Westerner or Turk, was found late Thursday outside the strife-torn city of Samarra at a road junction leading to Fallujah, Iraqi police said.
Australian officials said they were investigating whether the body found outside Samarra could be that of one of two Australians allegedly kidnapped earlier this week.
And the Swedish foreign ministry also said three Swedes of Iraqi origin may have been kidnapped over the past two weeks.
In northern Iraq, a Syrian trucker snatched from his three-vehicle Syrian-registered convoy transporting foodstuffs was freed on Friday, a day after he was seized, police said.