Baghdad - Angry Iraqi villagers fired into the air on Saturday as they buried more than a dozen victims of a US airstrike that Sunni leaders condemned as a massacre.

Car bombs exploded in cities north and south of the capital, killing 10 people and wounding scores, as US President George W. Bush called on Republicans and Democrats to work together on a new strategy for Iraq.

Underlining the chaos in Iraq, one of Saddam Hussein's nephews, Ayman al-Sabawi, escaped from a prison northwest of the city of Mosul on Saturday.

Sabawi, accused of financing the Sunni insurgency against US forces and the Shi'ite-led government, escaped with the help of a guard, a senior Mosul police officer told Reuters.

In his weekly radio address, Bush said the two US parties should "come together and find greater consensus on the best way forward."

His call followed the release this week of recommendations by a bipartisan panel that described the situation in Iraq as "grave and deteriorating" and urged a regional diplomatic effort and more US training for Iraqi army units.

Also on Saturday, outgoing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a lightning rod for criticism of the war, made an unannounced trip to Iraq to offer his appreciation of US troops serving there, a Pentagon spokesman said.

Iraq's national security adviser on Saturday accused Iran and Syria of deliberately failing to secure their borders with Iraq, saying most suicide bombers entered from Syria.

"Ninety percent of the suicide bombers actually land at Damascus airport and ... cross the border into Iraq," Mowaffak al-Rubaie said at a security forum in Bahrain.

The US military said the airstrike Friday on the predominantly Sunni village of Jalameda, near Ishaqi, 90 km (56 miles) north of Baghdad, targeted al Qaeda militants. It said 18 men and two women were killed.

But local officials in Jalameda said there were 17 victims and they included six women and five children. Relatives showed the children's bodies to journalists.

HUNDREDS MARCH

In March, Ishaqi police accused US troops of tying up and shooting to death six adults and five children and then calling in an airstrike to destroy the house. An investigation by the US unit involved concluded there was no wrongdoing.

Hundreds of chanting residents of Jalameda marched through Ishaqi on Saturday firing shots and carrying banners that read: "The people of Ishaqi condemn the mass killing by the occupation forces."

The bodies, wrapped in white cloth, were laid out in rows on the ground before being buried.

"We ask the Americans to be merciful. They kill civilians alleging they are terrorists. Ishaqi is a catastrophe," said Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the biggest Sunni political bloc in parliament.

In fresh violence, a suicide car bomber killed seven people and wounded 44 in a crowded market in the holy Shi'ite city of Kerbala on Saturday, hospital sources said.

About the same time, three people were killed and three wounded in a car bomb explosion in the ethnically mixed northern city of Mosul.

The country has been racked by bloodletting between majority Shi'ites and once-dominant Sunnis since the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in February.

The US military also reported the deaths of two Marines in Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency against US forces, who, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group said, should begin pulling out by early 2008.

Bush has reacted coolly to that proposal as well as one urging the United States to hold direct talks with Iran and Syria, which he accuses of fueling the violence with their respective support for Shi'ite militants and Sunni insurgents.

More than 2,900 US troops have died and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed since the 2003 US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.