At least five people were killed, including three Iraqi soldiers, and another 22 wounded when two car bombs and a roadside bomb exploded in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Wednesday, hospital and police sources said.

Explosives packed into a parked car went off near an army patrol, killing three soldiers and wounding four passersby in eastern Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of the capital Baghdad, police sources said.

Another car bomb detonated nearby, killing two people and wounding 18 others, while a roadside bomb went off in the same area, injuring two street cleaners, the sources said.

Violence has subsided sharply in Iraq since the sectarian strife in 2006-07, but Sunni Islamist insurgents and Shi'ite Muslim mlitias still commit daily bombings and assassinations.

The United States has about 40,000 troops in Iraq. U.S. President Barack Obama said last week that they would be withdrawn by December 31 according to the terms of a 2008 bilateral security pact.

(Reporting by Jamal al-badrani in Mosul; Writing by Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Sami Aboudi and Mark Heinrich)

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