BAGHDAD (AFP) - The Baghdad elite continued to celebrate Iraq's Asian Cup victory with music and dancing at the most fortified compound in town on Saturday before their heroes made a quick exit from the war-torn nation.

Youth and Sports Minister Jassem Jaafar hosted politicians and dignitaries at a party for the team at a luxury hotel inside Baghdad's Green Zone, the often-shelled city district that houses the Iraqi government and US embassy.

Guests cheered to the beat of folk music, waved giant Iraqi flags and congratulated the squad on last Sunday's victory that has been celebrated as a rare moment of national solidarity by most of Iraq's war-weary population.

Jaafar placed garlands of plastic flowers round team members' necks and their gleaming silver cup took pride of place on a bed of plastic purple flowers.

But as with homecoming festivities on Friday, ordinary Iraqis were kept at bay. Instead, government officials, members of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, football officials and lawmakers were prominent among the crowd.

President Jalal Talabani expressed hope that the victory would encourage politicians to unite against the disunity that saw the largest Sunni bloc withdraw from the Shiite-dominated government on Wednesday.

"This victory will help to patch up and strengthen alliances between groups on the basis of national reconciliation," he told a separate news conference.

But shortly after the party, various squad members flew out of Iraq, bound for the relative peace of Jordan and other Arab states where many of them play their club football far from the killing fields of home.

"Some of the Iraqi football team players left for Amman this afternoon. Afterwards they will go to Damascus where the Iraqi Olympic team will be based and train," said Najeh Hamud, deputy chairman of Iraq's Football Federation.

Federation official Tariq Ahmed said only five of the 22-man national side would remain, two of whom have contracts with a club in the northern city of Arbil, in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.

Around a third of the players decided not to return to Baghdad at all, including captain and winning scorer Yunis Mahmoud, even for the official homecoming held under thick security in the Green Zone.

Mahmoud, a Sunni Arab, had said he feared death if he returned to Baghdad. The bombings and the shootings that have helped push four million Iraqi refugees abroad continued on Saturday.

In northern Baghdad, a roadside bomb blew up next to an Iraqi military patrol, killing one civilian and wounding five others, security officials said.

In the ethnically fraught northern city of Kirkuk, gunmen shot dead police investigations Lieutenant Colonel Ismail Salam Khalaf as he was leaving home for work, said Colonel Adel Zain al-Abaddein.

The US military also announced that a marine was killed on Tuesday in flashpoint Al-Anbar province, bringing US losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,661, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.

Ongoing US crackdowns on Al-Qaeda, considered one of the most destablising forces in Iraq, and affiliates of the extremist network saw 33 people captured in the north and in the Tigris River valley around Baghdad, the military said.

US forces also killed four armed rebels and called in an air strike to blow up a weapons cache during a pre-dawn raid in Qasirin, in violence-sodden Diyala province in raids targeting Shiite militiamen, the military said.

In southern Iraq, British artillery fire slammed into a disused oil facility, sparking a substantial blaze, officials said.

The strike was ordered after militiamen attacked a coordination centre used by British and Iraqi forces in Basra, and their firing point was identified, British military spokesman Major Mike Shearer told AFP.