At least 23 people were killed on Monday in Iraq, including 12 in two Baghdad car bomb attacks, security and medical officials said. The two blasts occurred within minutes of each other, both involving explosives-laden cars in central Baghdad's Karrada neighbourhood, one on a road and the other targeting a passing police patrol.
At least 12 people, including three policemen, were killed and another 38 including women were wounded in the attacks, security officials and a medic at the capital's Ibn Nafis hospital said.
A separate car bomb rocked an area near Baghdad's so-called Green Zone, a US-controlled part of the war-torn capital, killing one person and wounding another three. Iraqi security officials said the bomb exploded just 400 metres (yards) from the heavily fortified zone, which houses the US and British embassies, and the Iraqi parliament.
"The car exploded outside a restaurant on the road leading to the zone. At least one person is killed and three wounded," a security official said, adding several shops were damaged. A civilian was killed and another seven wounded in a separate roadside bomb blast that struck a minibus in central Baghdad's Kifah street, security officials said. In another attack on Monday, five Iraqi soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb near the Iranian border.
Iraqi army lieutenant Muntadhar Mohammed said the bomb targeted the military patrol between the towns of Badra and Bela Druz, 180 kilometres (110 miles) east of Baghdad.
"All the five members of the patrol were killed in the early morning attack," Mohammed said. In the southern city of Amara, gunmen shot dead a former Baath party member, police said.
Gunmen also killed a man and wounded his wife when they shot at the couple's car on a highway near the town of Iskandiriyah, south of Baghdad, a local police officer said. Another policeman was also killed in an armed assault at a police checkpoint in central Iskandiriyah, he said.
He said police also found three corpses of men who were tortured and shot dead in the eastern part of the town. It was not known when they were killed. In the city of Hilla, 100 kilometres south of Baghdad, lawyer Zaydan al-Shammari was shot dead by gunmen, police Lieutenant Karim al-Amari said.
The US forces in Iraq said that at least nine suspected militants were killed and more than a dozen captured in raids across Iraq on Monday. Meanwhile, the US military said it had lost four soldiers at the weekend when their patrols were hit by roadside bombs. One was killed when insurgents detonated a bomb near his vehicle in Baghdad on Saturday, while the other died of wounds sustained in a blast on Sunday.
A third soldier was killed on Friday when a roadside bomb struck his Humvee south of the city of Samarra, in a Sunni region north of the capital that sees frequent insurgent attacks. And in the western Anbar province a marine was killed in combat operations on Saturday. The latest fatalities took the US military's losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,633, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
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