Two near-simultaneous car bombs rocked the Iraqi capital on Sunday, killing at least 29 people and wounding 111 in the city's deadliest day in a month.
The violence, which saw 38 people killed across the country, was the worst to hit Iraq since US troops declared an official end to combat operations on 1 September, and comes with no new government yet formed since a March poll.
The twin blasts struck near the Aden junction in north Baghdad and in the residential district of Mansur in the west at around 10am.
An interior ministry official put the death toll at 29 - 19 in Aden and 10 in Mansur.
‘It was a minibus - the driver stopped and told people nearby that he was going to go see a doctor,’ said Abu Abdullah, 40, who was near the site of the Aden bombing. ‘A few minutes later, it exploded.’
A witness said the blast, at a National Security department office building, left a crater three metres in diameter.
In Mansur, another witness reported seeing several bloodied bodies on the street, with many cars burned out and two buildings destroyed, while nearby houses were also badly damaged.
The explosion was outside an office of mobile phone company Asiacell, he said, but it was unclear if the office itself was the target.
‘When the bomb exploded, all of our papers and chairs were thrown into the air and we were flung to the floor,’ said one Asiacell employee who did not want to give his name.
A medical official at Al-Yarmuk hospital in west Baghdad said it had received 10 dead bodies and treated 59 people, including 11 women and two children.
Also on Sunday, a father and son were killed by a magnetic bomb attached to their car in Ghazaliyah, west Baghdad, the interior ministry official said.
He added that three mortar rounds were fired into the heavily fortified Green Zone, home to many foreign embassies and government buildings, but they had not caused casualties or damage.
West of Baghdad in the Sunni Arab town of Fallujah, a suicide bomber killed six people, including three soldiers, near a popular restaurant in the city centre.
The attack comes four days after a joint US-Iraqi raid in Fallujah left seven civilians dead, sparking public anger in the city.
Also west of the capital in Abu Ghraib, an anti-al-Qaeda militia leader was killed and two others wounded by a roadside bomb, a defence ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
The latest violence shattered a relative calm in Baghdad since Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that follows the holy fasting month of Ramadan, which typically sees a spike in attacks.
