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By Mussab Al-Khairalla

BAGHDAD, Feb 3 (Reuters) - A truck bomb killed at least 95 people and wounded 200 in a busy market in central Baghdad on Saturday, police sources said.

The blast in Sadriya, an area where Shi'ite Kurds predominate, shattered vegetable and meat stalls, a Reuters witness said. Emergency workers pulled bodies from the debris and piled them on pickup trucks.

The blast, which sent plumes of black smoke into the air, left a wide crater in the street. The district has suffered a number of large bombings in recent months.

U.S. President George W. Bush plans to send 21,500 more troops, especially to Baghdad, in a new security push widely regarded as a final attempt to avert all-out sectarian civil war between the Shi'ite Muslim majority and once dominant Sunnis.

A day after a U.S. intelligence report said elements of the conflict in Iraq could be called civil war, the country's top Shi'ite cleric renewed an appeal for Iraqis to reject violence.

In the northern, ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, a string of car bombings, including a suicide attack, killed at least four civilians and wounded 37. Two of the cars detonated outside the offices of the main Kurdish parties in the city.

Fearful residents rushed home and shops shut early in anticipation of more attacks, while police imposed a vehicle curfew. A police source said all entrances to Kirkuk were closed to prevent more car bombings.

Further north, another curfew was imposed in Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, after clashes between insurgents and police erupted in several neighbourhoods. A police source said the militants planned to take over the city.

Violence continued despite the curfew. A car bomb hit an ambulance and killed an injured woman who was being taken to hospital and six mortar bombs struck the offices of the state-funded Iraqiya television channel.

In the Shi'ite theological centre of Najaf, Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani repeated his calls for calm.

"The Islamic nation is passing through difficult conditions and facing tremendous challenges that threaten its future," his new fatwa, or religious edict, said.

"Everybody knows the necessity for us to stand together and reject the sectarian tension to avoid stirring sectarian differences."

INCREASING TROOPS

Elsewhere, the U.S. military said two more U.S. soldiers had died in the Sunni province of Anbar, an insurgent stronghold.

The military reported the killing of three al Qaeda militants in a firefight in Falluja and a fourth militant north of Baghdad, and said they belonged to foreign fighter networks.

After warning that elements of the Iraq conflict had become tantamount to civil war, the intelligence report said progress must be made within 12-18 months to avoid further deterioration.

The Iraqi government plans to use the extra U.S. forces -- on top of some 130,000 U.S. troops already in Iraq -- in a new security plan that aims to clear Baghdad of militants and hold territory. Previous such efforts have largely failed.

An audio message by the head of an al Qaeda-led militant group called on his fighters to focus more on operations outside Baghdad in preparation for a large increase of troops in the capital.

"We today announce a strategy," said the speaker, identifying himself as Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State of Iraq.

"It does not involve Baghdad alone but all parts of the Islamic state," he said, in reference to a body of Sunni Arab provinces in Iraq set up by al Qaeda's Iraq wing and other Sunni militant groups in October.

In November, six car bombs in different parts of the Sadr City neighbourhood of Baghdad killed 202 people and wounded 250. (Additional reporting by Mustafa Mahmoud and Sherko Raouf in Kirkuk and Mariam Karouny in Baghdad)

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