A suicide car bomber killed up to 50 people and wounded more than 70 at a crowded bus station in the Iraqi holy city of Kerbala on Saturday, police said.
In Baghdad, police said a suicide bomber detonated his vehicle before a checkpoint at the southern Jadriyah bridge, killing eight people and burning several cars in the second major attack on a bridge in the capital in the last two days
Television footage showed the twisted, blackened wreck of what was thought to have been the car used to deliver the bomb as ambulance and rescue services worked to save the wounded.
On Thursday, a truck bomb killed at least seven people on Sarafiya bridge in northern Baghdad, destroying most of the steel structure and sending several cars plunging into the River Tigris.
Saturday’s violence came a day after leaders from across Iraq’s sectarian divide pleaded for unity at a special session of Parliament, gathering under high security to condemn a suicide bombing that tore through the building on Thursday.
Television footage from the bombing in Kerbala, 110km south-west of Baghdad, showed wounded being carried from the scene and what appeared to be the charred body of a child.
A police source put the death toll at 50 but a director of the al-Husseini hospital in Kerbala said 41 people had been killed and 60 wounded.
The attack occurred near a crowded market and about 200m from the Imam Hussein shrine, where the grandson of Islam’s Prophet Muhammed is buried — one of the most important sites for Shi’ites.
United States and Iraqi officials have launched a crackdown in Baghdad that officials hope will give the government breathing space to pull Iraq back from the brink of civil war between majority Shi’ites and once dominant minority Sunni Arabs.
The operation has succeeded in reducing the number of targeted killings, but US and Iraqi commanders have found car and suicide bombers much harder to stop.
An al Qaeda-backed group, the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq, claimed responsibility in a web statement for the worst breach of security in Baghdad’s most secure area, which killed a member of Parliament and wounded two dozen other people in the building’s restaurant.
Previous calls for unity by Iraq’s leaders have mostly fallen on deaf ears as sectarian violence has spiralled.
In the wake of recent violence, Washington and some Iraqi politicians dismissed suggestions the attack signalled a failure of the US-Iraqi security crackdown in the capital. – Reuters