Kuwait City, meanwhile, was hit by a missile for the first time in its history early Saturday but disaster was narrowly averted as it landed in the water and caused mainly material damage, only injuring two people lightly.

Air raids on Baghda resumed Saturday morning after the latest bombing targeted a building in the main presidential palace on Friday night.

Mosul was also struck, according to the Al-Jazeera television's correspondent in the northern city. US military sources also said missile launchers were targeted in overnight raids in the north of the country.

The fresh bombardment came as the Iraqi capital was reeling from Friday's strike on the Al-Nasser market in northeastern Baghdad.

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

Other doctors later said as many as 52 had died in the deadliest bombardment on Baghdad since the beginning of the war to topple Saddam Hussein on March 20.

Witnesses told AFP the projectile -- a bomb or missile -- struck as neighborhood people were doing their evening shopping at the end of the weekly day of prayer.

Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Owens, spokesman for the US command headquarters directing the war on Iraq, only said the US military was "still trying to learn the truth of the matter."

Washington believes a large proportion of the Iraqi population favours military action to topple Saddam and, as its troops are advancing ever closer to the capital, is keen to limit civilian casualties.

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.

The British defence ministry announced a British soldier was killed and four others injured in a friendly fire incident in southern Iraq Friday.

Out of the 23 British soldiers who died in the conflict so far, four were killed in action, five from friendly fire and 14 in helicopter accidents.

The US military said Friday night that its casualty toll stood at 28, 20 of whom died in combat.

In Kuwait City, a missile rocked a seafront shopping centre, causing no injuries but sending shockwaves through the Gulf country which is the main launchpad for the US-British attack on Iraq.

"The ground shook like an earthquake. I immediately called 777 for emergency services and a moment later I saw huge flames," eyewitness Faisal al-Sallal told AFP.

Sallal, who was jogging along the waterfront when the missile hit, described it as "green, oval-shaped, with fins". Some of the fractured remains of the missile carried writing in both Arabic and English, he said.

The missile was not immediately identified but it hit Kuwait hours after the US military said its fighters targeted missile launchers in southern Iraq "to degrade Iraq's ability to strike coalition forces, the Iraqi people, or neighbouring countries."

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.

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.

US 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."

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, ridiculed the charges and lambasted the United States.

Washington was trying to cover up its "failure" in Iraq, a foreing ministry spokesman said.

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.

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

WAR.WIRE