almotamar.net google - (CBS/AP) Bombs in and around Baghdad killed at least eight people Thursday morning, as sectarian revenge killings continued in the northwestern city of Tal Afar, where Shiite police and militants rampaged through Sunni areas the day before, executing as many as 70 men.

A bomb planted under a parked car tore through an outdoor market in a mixed Baghdad neighborhood, killing at least three people and wounding 26, police and hospital officials said.

About the same time, a car bomb went off near a Shiite mosque in the restive town of Mahmoudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, killing five people and wounding 15.

The mosque and four adjacent stores were slightly damaged, according to a police officer at the scene who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

In Tal Afar, five mortar shells slammed into a Shiite district, wounding three people, according to police Brig. Abdul-Karim al-Jibouri.

The shelling came a day after the Shiite militants and police went on a shooting rampage against Sunnis in the city. Those killings were triggered by twin truck bombings in the city the previous day that killed 80 people and wounded 185.

The city was under curfew Thursday for the second successive day, said al-Jibouri.

Police earlier reported that seven people were killed in the blast in the mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood of Al-Bayaa in southwestern Baghdad, but later revised the figure down to three.

They gave no explanation for the change, but the confusion and panic that prevail in the aftermath of bombings in Iraq had in the past led to similar revisions of casualty figures.

In other developments:
• The battle over Iraq war funding and whether it will include language about U.S. troop withdrawals is coming to a head. Congress is poised to send President Bush a bill that calls for a troop pullout by next year. The administration is calling it a charade since the votes aren't there to override a threatened veto, while Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid says President Bush needs to "get real."

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• Ambassador Ryan Crocker, seen at left, has been sworn in as the new top U.S. envoy to Iraq. He says he's taking over the "most critical foreign policy mission" facing the United States. The oath was administered by junior foreign service officer Tina Tran, who had served with Crocker in Islamabad and has been in the Baghdad embassy since last summer. "President Bush's policy is the right one. There has been progress; there is also much more to be done," he said.
• Iraq's national traffic police chief escaped an assassination attempt when gunmen ambushed his convoy in a northern Baghdad district Thursday morning, a police official said. Two of Gen. Jaafar Kadhim's guards were killed and two were injured when the gunmen opened fire on the convoy in the Sunni stronghold of Azamiyah, said the official.
• Elsewhere in the capital, a booby-trapped car abandoned on a main road in a western area blew up when police attempted to extract a dead body they found inside. The blast in the Amil district killed two policemen and wounded six people, including three more policemen, said police officials.