The latest bombing hit southeastern Baghdad around 11:45 pm (2045 GMT) and anti-aircraft batteries quickly responded, an AFP correspondent in the Iraqi capital said.

That came on the heels of a strike on Mosul at around 11:40 pm (2040 GMT), according to the Mosul correspondent of Doha-based Arabic-language television Al-Jazeera.

But the high drama Friday was the strike on the Al-Nasser market in northeastern Baghdad, followed by horrific Arab television footage of blood-spattered corpses and wailing women beating themselves in grief.

"Most of the victims are women, children and old people," Dr Harqi Razzuqi, head of An-Nur hospital near the market, told AFP. He put the market toll at 30 dead and 47 injured, many critical.

Other doctors later said as many as 52 had died, and that 31 death certificates had already been delivered to victims' families.

Muslim tradition requires burial within 24 hours of death, and corpses were being cleansed and shrouded in white cloth in mosques as lines of stark pine coffins awaited.

Witnesses told AFP the projectile -- a bomb or missile -- struck around 6:00 pm (1500 GMT) as neighborhood people were doing their evening shopping at the end of the weekly day of prayer.

One television station ran images of a morgue worker pulling open a drawer with two small bodies, those a lifeless boy nestled in the legs of a lifeless girl.

The station said there were no military targets near the market.

An AFP correspondent at the scene saw nine charred corpses, including those of two small children.

Leila Jassem's 16-month-old daughter Saja lay still on a hospital bed, on a drip and respirator. Two of Saja's siblings were killed and a third injured in the raid, which came when the children were playing in the family's nearby house.

"I am not crying because we are a strong people, thanks to God and our president," the 24-year-old mother said. "I ask (US President George W.) Bush why he's killing all these innocent people when we have done nothing to him."

Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Owens, spokesman for the US command headquarters directing the war on Iraq, later said he had no comment on the market raid.

"We're still trying to learn the truth of the matter," he said.

The Iraqi information ministry gave no exact figures but said a "large number" of civilians had been killed and wounded in the attack.

A US military spokesman in Qatar said early Saturday that four US marines were listed as missing following a clash with Iraqi forces around the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah.

"Four marines from the first marine expeditionary force are currently unaccounted for ... and their whereabouts are unknown," said Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Owens, speaking at the US military's forward command center.

He said the four went missing on Friday during a "combat operation."

Britain's Press Association reported a British soldier was killed and three others were injured in a friendly fire incident in southern Iraq Friday.

In Washington, the State Department claimed to have broken up Iraqi terrorist plots against US interests in at least two Middle Eastern countries and officials said they had uncovered similar attack plans for cities around the world.

"In recent days, we received information regarding specific terrorist plots in two countries involving Iraqi intelligence officers," said spokesman Richard Boucher said.

Friday's air raids on Baghdad followed a night of what reporters and other witnesses described as the heaviest bombardment in and around Baghdad since the war began on March 20.

The sky over Baghdad was black with smoke from burning buildings for much of the day after US and British warplanes and ships took advantage of a break in bad weather to hammer targets inside and near the city with bombs and missiles.

The southern city of Nasiriyah also came under fresh assault from the air as US and British forces destroyed an Iraqi command post and dropped at least one 2,000-pound (900-kilo) bomb there, an AFP photographer in the area reported.

Elsewhere Friday, US warplanes hammered targets including tanks and helicopters between Baghdad and the central city of Karbala thought to be held by a crack armored division of Iraq's Republican Guard.

US and British ground forces that had engaged in several fierce battles over the past week, mainly around towns in southern Iraq, consolidated Friday and moved to shore up supply lines and current positions.

President George W. Bush and top aides defended the Iraq invasion strategy as sound and on track after a top US field commander acknowledged that US forces were fighting a different and possibly longer war than the one they had planned for.

"The long distances we have travelled make it hard to push that amount of logistics -- water, fuel, ammo and chow -- over the vast area that's been covered," said marine First Lieutenant Tom Elssinger.

Bush, before leaving for a weekend at his Camp David retreat, said the US-led forces were making "great progress," and General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised the broad battle plan as "brilliant."

A senior Bush aide said the president scorned suggestions that the US-led effort in Iraq was becoming a quagmire.

A British ship carrying tonnes of urgently needed humanitarian aid meanwhile put into the captured southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr.

On the diplomatic front, the United Nations adopted a resolution allowing the resumption of humanitarian aid for Iraq through its "oil-for-food" program, suspended at the start of the war.

A spokesman said chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, who led the team assessing Iraq's compliance with UN resolutions in the run-up to the war, would step down when his contract runs out in June.

In northern Iraq, Kurdish rebel forces said they had advanced to within 16 kilometers (10 miles) of the strategic oil city of Kirkuk after clearing scores of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines left behind by retreating Iraqi troops.

A commander of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) described the Iraqi army as "finished." Iraqi forces near Kirkuk however fired a salvo of around 10 rockets into the town of Chamchamal.

At a Pentagon news briefing, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld charged that military equipment had crossed into the country from Syria and Iran-based rebels, warning Tehran and Damascus not to interfere with US and British operations in Iraq.

Syria, the only Arab member of the UN Security Council, meanwhile lambasted the United States.

President Bashar al-Assad told the Lebanese daily As-Safir he hoped Washington would fail to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

And if the United States and Britain seized the Iraqi capital, he said, they would be confronted by a "popular resistance" that would prevent them from controlling the country.

Al-Assad predicted US forces would become bogged down in Iraq as they had in Vietnam.

In Kuwait City, a massive explosion of undetermined origin shook one of the capital's largest shopping malls at around 0145 Saturday (2245GMT Friday).

The mall would have been closed to shoppers at that hour.

WAR.WIRE