Eight people were killed in Iraqi violence today an appeal for calm by leaders fearful that the country is edging towards civil war after a week of sectarian bloodshed.
A bomb killed five people at a bus station in the town of Hilla, south of Baghdad today. Police said it was not clear if the bomb was inside the minibus or exploded in the road as it passed.
Hilla is a mainly Shi'ite town surrounded by Sunni villages, and the attack came two days short of the anniversary of the bloodiest single al Qaeda bombing in Iraq, which killed 125 people there a year ago.
Elsewhere, a bomb in a Shi'ite mosque in Iraq's second largest city, Basra, caused minor injuries. It went off shortly after a rally in another part of the city being visited by the fiery Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
In Baghdad, where a ban on the use of cars was extended unitl tomorrow, a bomb killed two US soldiers overnight. Separately, a policeman was killed and two wounded when their patrol was hit by two roadside bombs near Madaen, another flashpoint for Sunni-Shi'ite violence just southeast of the city.
Hours earlier, following a round of calls to Iraqi leaders by US President George W Bush, Shi'ite Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari made a midnight televised appeal, flanked by Sunni and Kurdish politicians, urging Iraqis not to turn on each other after Wednesday's suspected al Qaeda bomb at a Shi'ite shrine.
A three-hour meeting produced a commitment from the main factions to form a unity coalition, although Sunni leader Tareq al-Hashemi said he was not yet ready to end a boycott of the US-sponsored coalition talks.
Four days of tit-for-tat reprisals have left more than 200 dead and mosques damaged, despite a daytime curfew on Baghdad that went into its third day on Sunday; the defense minister warned of the risk of a civil war that "will never end".