Two car bombing attacks in quick succession hit a market in a mainly Shiite district in Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 13 people and injuring more than 40, police said.
Elsewhere, U.S. airstrikes killed 14 suspects and destroyed a safe house for foreign fighters during a raid south of Baqouba that also led to the capture of two other suspects, the American military said. According to the AP, the military said the raid was targeting a foreign fighter believed responsible for multiple attacks on Iraqi and American forces in the area.
In the capital, a suicide car bombing attack took place in New Baghdad commercial area shortly after noon, near a major intersection lined with stores and kiosks selling food, clothes and household appliances. A parked car bomb went off shortly afterward as people converged on the area to help the victims or see what had happened. The 13 killed included two policemen, while four officers were among the 42 wounded, according to police reports.
In another violence reported by police on Saturday, armed men who wore commando uniforms and drove cars with license plates commonly used by the Interior Ministry stormed a computer company and abducted seven people, including shoppers, in the mainly Christian neighborhood of Sina'a.
Two mortar shells also slammed into a residential district in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah, killing two people and wounding seven others.
A taxi driver was shot to death after he was caught in the crossfire during clashes in the northern city of Mosul.
The bodies of five men also were pulled from the Tigris River in Suwayrah, 25 miles south of Baghdad, according to a morgue official. Bodies are found regularly floating in the river downstream — sometimes scores in a single day — most of them believed to have been abducted and killed by sectarian death squads.
