US officials in Turkey and Washington were in contact with Turkish officials and military commanders to press them to work with Washington to combat the guerrillas and not take act alone, a Western diplomat said. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.

Turkey's NTV television and Hurriyet newspaper reported yesterday that the government has instructed the military to draw up plans for a push into northern Iraq and to advise on the possibilities that such a move could lead to a clash with Iraqi Kurdish forces or US troops in the area.

Any operation was unlikely to take place before the end of August, when the current military chief of staff is replaced by an officer widely regarded as a hard-liner, NTV said.

The Western diplomat said the Turkish military has long had plans for fighting guerrillas in northern Iraq. Those plans range from limited artillery and air strikes on guerrilla bases to attacks by commando forces and a broader ground offensive.

American officials, including US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have repeatedly warned Turkey against entering northern Iraq, one of the few stable areas of the country.

US Ambassador Ross Wilson said on Monday that Turkish, Iraqi and US cooperation is a "more sensible way to go forward than perhaps to ... try to do it unilaterally."

In Iraq, Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan regional government that runs the north of the country, appeared to be addressing Turkish concerns about guerrilla attacks when he said yesterday that Iraqi Kurds "won't allow anyone to harm our neighbours by using our territory."

But he also warned that the problem with the guerrillas "cannot be solved through military means alone," Turkey's DHA news agency reported.

Turkey considers the guerrillas to be terrorists and has refused to talk with them.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared to be confirming reports that the military was ordered to draft plans when he said yesterday that "we know how to take care of (our terrorism problem) on our own... Our competent units are making preparations and will continue to do so."

Erdogan's spokesman, Akif Beki, refused to comment on the reports and instead referred to government spokesman Cemil Cicek's Monday statement to the press. Cicek called on Iraqi and US forces to take stronger action against the rebels and warned that if they did not, "Turkey is going to use its international rights until the very end."

Officials on Tuesday reported no unusual military activity in the border regions.

A Turkish push into northern Iraq could also threaten relations with EU countries, which have been pressing Turkey to improve minority Kurdish rights as a step toward defusing tensions in the Kurdish southeast.

An incursion might also be a very difficult military mission.

The guerrillas are mostly based in the Qandil mountains, an area 80km (50 miles) from the Turkish border with Iran. The guerrillas infiltrate into south-eastern Turkey from those bases to attack.

Turkey has long had some 2,000 troops in northern Iraq near the border monitoring the area.

If Turkey sent in military units they would have to travel through territory controlled by potentially hostile Iraqi Kurds. The area is mountainous and Turkish Kurdish guerrillas often cross into bordering Iranian territory, which is mostly Kurdish.

"I don't think it is Turkey's desire to stage an intervention in northern Iraq," said Ilter Turan, professor of international relations at Istanbul Bilgi University. Turkey "is simply trying to draw attention to the fact that it is an untenable position."

But he quickly warned that "if you don't tread a line very carefully, you can become a captive of your own rhetoric."

In Kufa, a city on the Euphrates south of Baghdad, the suicide bomber drove his vehicle into a dusty square 100 yards from a Shia shrine at 7.30am. He knew that poor day laborers gathered there looking for work. He said "I need labourers" and they clambered into his van which exploded a few moments later killing them and other workers standing around. "Four of my cousins were killed," said Nasir Feisal, who survived the blast. "They were standing beside the van. Their bodies were scattered far apart by the blast.

The dramatic escalation in sectarian killings started on July 9 when black-clad Shia militiamen sealed off the largely Sunni al-Jihad district in west Baghdad and slaughtered every Sunni they identified, killing over 40 of them after glancing at their identity cards. Since then there has been a tit-for-tat massacre almost every day. On Monday gunmen, almost certainly Sunni, first attacked Shia mourners at a funeral near Mahmoudiya, a market town of 100,00 people 75 miles north of Kufa. They then shot down another 50 people in the local market.

The failure of the newly formed government of Nouri al-Maliki to stop the mass killings has rapidly discredited it. The Shia and Sunni militias - in the latter case the insurgents fighting the Americans - are becoming stronger as people look to them for protection. After the explosion in Kufa angry crowds hurled stones at the police demanding that the militiamen of the Mehdi Army, followers of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, take over security in the city. "We want the Mehdi Army to protect us," screamed a woman in a black abaya robe. "We want Muqtada's army to protect us." Other people chanted at the police, who began to fire in the air to disperse them, "you are traitors!" and "American agents!"

In much of Baghdad the militias have taken over and are killing or driving out the minority community. It has become very easy to get killed anywhere in central Iraq, where one third of the 27 million population live, through belonging to the wrong sect. Many people carry two sets of identity papers, one forged at a cost of about $60, so they can claim to be a Sunni at Sunni checkpoints and Shia at Shia checkpoints.

Even this may not be enough to stay alive. Aware of the number of forged identity papers being used Mehdi Army checkpoints in the largely Shia Shu'ala district in west Baghdad have started to ask drivers questions about Shia theology to which a Sunni would not know the answer. One man, who was indeed a Shia, passed the test but was still executed because he was driving a car with number plates from Anbar, a wholly Sunni province.

While the White House and Downing Street still refuse to use the phrase 'civil war' Iraqis in the centre of the country have no doubt what is happening. Baghdad mortuary alone received 1,595 bodies in June. It has got worse since then. Many people are fleeing. On one day early this month at al-Salhai bus station in central Baghdad there were 23 buses, each carrying 49 people as well as 30 four wheel drive vehicles, all departing for Syria carrying refugees. Access to Jordan has become more difficult with many Iraqis turned back at the border. All buses have Sunni drivers these days since five Shia drivers were killed as 'spies' driving through the Sunni heart lands of western Iraq on their way to Jordan and Syria.

The draft under consideration in the UN would make it mandatory for Iran to suspend enrichment and includes threats of sanctions if it does not comply.

Lavrov did not say whether Russia would back imposing sanctions if Iran failed to comply, striking a more conciliatory note than the US.

Vitaly Churkin, a Russian ambassador, said: "We are not in a rush at all. We do not want to ambush Iran in any way. We're very much in a negotiating political mode. We do not want to dictate things to Iran.

"Nobody's pushing, nobody's pushing Iran anywhere."

The resoultion comes after Tehran did not respond to a package of commercial and technical incentives that was submitted last month by six world powers in an attempt to persuade it to stop its uranium enrichment programme.

Foreign ministers of the six member countries - Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the US - met on July 12 and expressed disappointment that Iran had failed to respond positively to the package.

"A lot of time has passed, a lot more than the Iranian president promised our president in terms of when Iran would give its reply," Lavrov said in an interview published in Kommersant newspaper.

Russia is one of the five powers with a veto on the Security Council.

It is 8am on a beautiful summer's morning. Outside Café Younes, half a dozen men are sipping coffee and reading newspapers under the shade of the trees. Fifteen minutes later, somewhere not very far away, a bomb hits Beirut, but nobody flinches or even glances up from his newspaper. The Lebanese are accustomed to it.

Around the corner, Starbucks has been closed since the start of the bombardment, as have so many other cafes and shops. The problem, apart from the lack of customers, is that many of the staff have left Beirut or can no longer get to work.

For a coffee shop, Café Younes probably has the longest drinks menu in Beirut: there's Colombian coffee, Ethiopian coffee, Guatemalan, Brazilian, and more. A sign boasts that it has been in business since 1935, and Amin, the proprietor, is determined to battle on as long as supplies of coffee last.

For the moment, he has plenty. He roasts coffee on the premises, filling the street with its aroma - and green, unroasted coffee beans keep for a long time, he says.

Supplies of other things are more precarious and one of the government's main concerns is to keep everyone fed. "We have essential supplies for two months," Sami Haddad, the minister of economy and trade, said yesterday.

"They are in certain locations in the country but there is a difficulty of transportation. Any large transportation vehicles are being bombed ... There is difficulty getting flour to some villages."

To conserve fuel, power is being turned off in Beirut for six hours a day. "Our fuel will last 45 to 60 days on this basis," the minister said.

Yesterday, Israel launched 100 strikes against Lebanon - roughly one every 15 minutes. It was the bloodiest day so far, with 57 civilians killed, along with one Hizbullah fighter, according to the official figures.

The number of civilian deaths has now exceeded 300, and the average seems to be about 40 to 50 a day.

"Civilians are being deliberately targeted," Mr Haddad said. On Tuesday, the Israelis hit a convoy of trucks carrying medical supplies from Syria in the Bekaa valley. Several people were reported injured when a church in Rmeish was hit.

Yesterday, for the first time, the Israelis bombed the predominantly Christian neighbourhood of Ashrafiyeh, in east Beirut. Their target was a truck used to drill for water, which they apparently mistook for a Hizbullah rocket launcher. To anyone on the ground, the idea of Hizbullah fighters operating from the Christian heartland seems utterly bizarre.

Four front-page headlines from the Lebanese Daily Star this week:
Monday: War takes even deadlier turns
Tuesday: The ruin of a nation
Wednesday: Wasteland in the making
Thursday: And then it got worse

Some of the local TV stations have cameras permanently trained on the southern neighbourhood, to catch the plumes of smoke - "live", as it were - when the bombs drop. A friend watching the other night noted that he could see and hear the explosions on TV a second or two before before the bang reached Hamra, near the city centre.

Amid all this, nobody seems to be talking very much about the original issue - the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah. According to the Daily Star yesterday, Lebanon "has been chosen as a battleground in which the Israelis will brutalise the Lebanese in order to teach the Iranians a lesson on behalf of the west". Get your head round that, if you can.

Today, all being well, we shall see the Royal Navy's biggest evacuation of British and Commonwealth citizens so far. An aircraft carrier, HMS Illustrious, and an assault ship, HMS Bulwark, are expected to arrive, along with a civilian vessel. They could take as many as 2,800 people to safety in Cyprus today.

The Britons being evacuated are something of a disappointment for the tabloids. They are not, on the whole, your average lobster-pink Torremolinos holidaymakers. Many have brown skins and Arabic names, and most have dual British and Lebanese nationality.

On Tuesday, a 12-year-old boy posed for the Daily Mail as he stepped on to HMS Gloucester, waving a couple of English flags (presumably left over from the World Cup). The only thing that marred this patriotic scene was the boy's name - Rami.

A freelance journalist who sent photos to a tabloid paper was informed by a disappointed editor that the people in his pictures were not very "British-looking".

Less clear among all this is the fate of the thousands of Filipinos and Asians who cook and clean for Lebanese families and walk their dogs. I have no idea how many of them are leaving, or would want to leave it they could.

The rumour now in Beirut is that once most of the westerners have left, the Israelis will feel free to blast the city to smithereens. Personally, I doubt it - and I sincerely hope I'm right. There are still a large number of television cameras in the city, which ought to give the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, food for thought.