Gunmen seized 10 workers from a bakery Sunday in a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, while a car bomb exploded near a university in the northern city of Mosul, killing a woman and wounding 19 other people, police said.
U.S. forces, meanwhile, combed through the "Triangle of Death," a predominantly Sunni region south of the capital for a second day looking for two troops missing since an attack Friday on a traffic checkpoint that also killed one of their comrades.
Thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops also set up outposts Sunday west of Baghdad as part of an operation to establish Iraqi army bases in the city of Ramadi. According to the AP, U.S. commanders stressed that the operation was not a large-scale assault on the city, despite reports by Arab television channels and some Western outlets of an impending attack on the city similar to the 2004 operation to root out insurgents in Fallujah.
Two long columns of U.S. and Iraqi armored vehicles met little resistance late Saturday as they encircled the southern side Ramadi. Resistance fighters fired two mortar shells that landed about 500 yards away from where the troops were establishing the outposts on Sunday.
In Baghdad, gunmen arrived in two cars, broke into the bakery and abducted the 10 workers in the northern suburb of Kazimiyah, police Lt. Mohammed Khayoun said.
A mortar shell Sunday hit the al-Sadiq University for Islamic Studies on Palestine Street, one of the capital's main thoroughfares, wounding five students and a teacher, police Lt. Ahmed Qasim said.
Police also found the bullet-riddled bodies of 10 men who showed signs of torture in several areas of Baghdad, and the body of a man who was shot in the head was found in Karbala, 50 miles south of the capital.
