The most recent attacks this morning were in Baghdad, where car bombs ripped through six mainly Shiite neighbourhoods. "I heard women screaming, I saw people running in all directions, chairs scattered in the street. My windows were blown out, my mother and two kids were injured too," Alla Majid, still shaking after a blast in Baghdad's Sadr City, said. But those blasts came hard on the heels of a wave of coordinated attacks which saw terrorists hit targets including security forces and crowded marketplaces in at least 11 cities across the nation.
Estimates of the death toll ranged from 65 to more than 100. The attacks also left around 350 people injured, according to figures released by security and medical sources. The deadliest single incident was near the shrine of Imam Ali al-Sharqi in southern Iraq, where the local hospital said at least 16 people had died and 60 more were injured by two car bombs. With its main hospital overflowing with the injured, mosques in the nearby city of Amara used prayer loudspeakers to call for blood donations.
Among the other attacks:
Insurgents killed at least 11 soldiers when they stormed a remote army post near Dujail, north of Baghdad
Three people died when a car bomb exploded in a market in the southern port city of Basra
Seven people died in the volatile oil-rich northern province of Kirkuk when a bomb exploded beside a line of police recruits applying for jobs with a state-run oil company
A car bomb exploded outside a French consular office in Nasiriyah in southern Iraq.
There were also attacks in Fallujah; Tel Afar; and south of Samarra
There has been no claim of responsibility for the attacks, but Sunni insurgents have launched numerous attacks this year aimed at destabilising the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.
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