BAGHDAD (AFP) — A spate of powerful car and suicide bombings has killed 44 people and wounded more than 100 in less than 24 hours across Iraq, shattering what had been a relatively calm holy month of Ramadan.
Police in the restive city of Baquba north of Baghdad on Tuesday revised to 28 killed and 34 wounded the casualty toll from a devastating suicide attack on Monday evening in a village mosque.
Security and health officials in the Iraqi capital, meanwhile, said a double car bombing on Tuesday morning killed six people and wounded at least 20, while a suicide car bomber in the southern city of Basra killed three people.
Monday night's attack targeted a reconciliation meeting between two feared militias at Shifta village west of Baquba during the evening meal that breaks the daytime fast observed by Muslims during Ramadan.
Seven policemen, including three high-ranking officers, were killed when the suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest in the crowded mosque.
"We have a total of 28 people killed and 34 wounded," police Brigadier General Khaider al-Timimi told AFP.
His figures were confirmed by the head of Baquba morgue, Ahmed Fuad.
An Iraqi security official said the reconciliation meeting was between the Shiite Mahdi Army militia and the Sunni insurgent group, the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution.
In recent months the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution have joined forces with the US military in securing volatile Sunni Arab regions across Iraq.
The double car bombing in Baghdad came mid-morning on Tuesday outside Al-Rafidayin Bank in Zayunah, a mixed inner city neighbourhood.
"The blasts occurred 30 seconds apart," a security official said.
The number of bomb attacks has dropped since a "surge" of US troops onto the streets of Baghdad six months ago, but US commanders acknowledge they are unable to halt them altogether.
In a later attack Tuesday, a roadside bomb struck a minibus in Baghdad's eastern Kamaliyah district, killing one person and wounding three.
In the Karrada neighbourhood, another roadside bomb exploded near a police patrol, wounding seven people.
In the southern port city of Basra, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the wheel of a car outside police headquarters, local police chief General Jalil Khalaf told AFP.
Three people -- one a policeman -- were killed and five others wounded, the general said, while a hospital official confirmed the deaths but said 20 more were wounded, among them six policemen.
The overwhelmingly Shiite city of Basra has been the scene of bloody inter-Shiite rivalry between radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's militia, Abdel Aziz Hakim's Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, and the Fadhila party.
The security forces, especially the police, have been widely infiltrated by the Shiite militias whose rivalry over control of southern Iraq's largest city has escalated since British forces withdrew in early September.
On Monday afternoon, a bomber slammed his explosives-laden truck against a joint Iraqi police and army checkpoint in the centre of the northern town of Tal Afar, killing two policeman, a soldier and three civilians, while 17 civilians were wounded in the attack.
The fresh surge of violence comes amid a period of relative calm that followed a bloody start to Ramadan on September 13, when top Sunni sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Reesha, who spearheaded a fight against Al-Qaeda, was killed by a bomb in Anbar province.
Senior US military commanders say that levels of violence during Ramadan, which since the US-led invasion of 2003 has become a period of increased bloodletting, will provide an indicator as to how soon American troop levels in Iraq can be reduced.
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