By Dean Yates
from YAHOO! NEWS

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Car bombs and mortar attacks killed 50 people in Iraq, police and local officials said on Saturday, while the U.S. military said six of its soldiers had been killed in the past two days.

One British soldier was also killed in the south.

The fresh violence follows a lull in Iraq, where tens of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops are on the offensive against insurgents in a bid to halt a slide into sectarian civil war.

Rising U.S. casualties have put President George W. Bush under mounting pressure from Democrats and from some senior figures in his own Republican Party to justify his strategy of ordering 28,000 more troops to Iraq.

There are now 157,000 U.S. military personnel there.

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