At least 36 people were killed across Iraq Tuesday, including 18 in a bombing campaign in the oil city of Kirkuk. Five car bombs, several of them involving suicide attackers, rocked the ethnically diverse city that has been more known individual killings between ethnic and sectarian groups.
Another attack was foiled when guards shot dead the driver of an explosives-laden car as he drove it toward the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party. The car did not exploded.
The first car bomb exploded at around 7:30 am (0330 GMT) in the Tisaeen market in an area largely inhabited by Shiite members of the city's Turkmen community, killing 13 people, including two policemen, and wounding 18. Approximately half an hour later, a suicide car bomber attempted to ram the main police headquarters, prompting police to open fire on it. The car exploded before reaching its target, police Major General Torhan Yussef said, but two policemen died and eight civilians were wounded.
The three other car bombs, one of which was a suicide attack, exploded in different parts of the city, killing three more policemen and wounding more than a dozen, including Colonel Taher Salah al-Din, police chief in the southern Hurriyah neighbourhood.
A bomb targeting a police patrol in central Baghdad killed one policemen and wounded four others, as well as injuring a prisoner they were transporting. Mortars falling on the Abu Chir neighbourhood in southern Baghdad killed one person and wounded 12.
A professor at the College of Engineering was shot dead as he left his house and 14 bodies, shot and bearing signs of torture, were found in and around the city.
In Karbala, gunmen shot dead a police captain and another policeman. A bomb targeting a police patrol in the Samarra market missed its target but killed four civilians and injured seven.
Four civilians, including a two-year-old child, and a policemen were killed in a series of attacks in Baquba, north-east of Baghdad. Gunmen killed three policemen and wounded three others in Balad Ruz, south-east of Baquba, while a man distributing newspapers in Fallujah was shot dead by gunmen.