A parked car bomb ripped through a packed outdoor market in southwestern Baghdad on Tuesday morning, killing 25 people and wounding 60 others. The deadly attack occurred about 10 a.m. in the Shiite-dominated neighborhood of Amil, damaging a nearby medical center, turning buildings into charred husks and setting a line of cars on fire, police said, according to the AP.
Earlier two roadside bombings rocked eastern and western Baghdad respectively, killing a civilian and wounding eight others.
Also Tuesday, two mortar shells slammed into a teacher's college affiliated with Baghdad University, killing three students and injuring seven others, police said.
At least 58 Iraqis were killed on Monday by attacks or found dead across Iraq, including seven people ambushed on a bus northeast of Baghdad, police said. The dead included 24 men whose bullet-riddled bodies were found across Baghdad, apparent victims of sectarian death squads.
British troops clashed with Shiite Muslim gunmen in the southern city of Basra. Britain's military said one British soldier and a civilian driver were killed when a supply convoy was attacked in the center of the city, the AP reported.
Elsewhere, American forces raided safe houses south of Baghdad but failed to find three soldiers missing since a May 12 ambush that left four other Americans and an Iraqi dead. "We've (identified) some safe houses and we targeted a couple of those today and they were able to slip away from us. But we're going to come at things from a different angle," a U.S. spokesman, Maj. Webster Wright.
On the political front, Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul-Qader al-Obeidi on Monday told reporters Iraq's military was drawing up plans in case U.S.-led forces left the country quickly. "The army plans on the basis of a worst case scenario so as not to allow any security vacuum," al-Obeidi said. "There are meetings with political leaders on how we can deal with a sudden pullout."
