Attacks on two Sunni neighbourhoods in Baghdad on Tuesday killed 29 people and wounded at least 85 more.
A car bomb exploded in a popular market in the Amil neighbourhood in the southwestern part of the city, killing 25 and wounding 60, said an official at the Iraqi Ministry of Information.

In Adhamiya in northern Baghdad, mortar shells killed four and wounded 25, most of them students at Ibn al-Haitham College.

The number of people wounded around the city was unclear, however. A worker at Yarmouk Hospital said the hospital had received 114 wounded.

In Diyala province on Tuesday, terrorists who had set up a roadblock resembling an official checkpoint opened fire on a car with a family inside, killing a man and a woman and their four children, police said.

A man who was shopping with his mother in Amil said the market was packed with people at the time of the explosion, which came from a parked truck near a checkpoint that lead to the area.

Some of the wounded were girls who had just left a girls’ intermediate school after finishing exams, said the witness, who asked not to be identified. Members of the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, fired guns into the air and forced people to stay in their homes, dispersing those who gathered at the scene, the witness said.

When American forces arrived soon after the explosion to seal off the area, they clashed with members of the Mahdi Army, he said.

Fear of arrests
“The fighters thought that the Americans were here to arrest them,” the witness said.

Tuesday’s violence followed a similarly bloody day across the country on Monday.

Gunmen ambushed a minibus passing through a troubled area of Diyala on Monday and killed five passengers, including a child, an Interior Ministry official said.

The minibus had left the town of Gisaireen in southeastern Diyala when it was attacked outside Hibhib, a village about 12 miles north of Baghdad, the official said.

The gunmen sprayed the bus with bullets and part of the vehicle was incinerated, according to the ministry official, who said four passengers were wounded in the attack.

Sunni Arab insurgents have been active in the area around Hibhib.