Two car bombs kill 11 in Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A suicide bomber detonated his car near a bakery and crowded market in Baghdad’s mainly Shiite Karrada neighbhorhood shortly after noon Saturday, killing at least six civilians.

In Kamaliya, another mainly Shiite district in eastern Baghdad, a car bomb tore through a street lined with auto parts and repair shops, killing at least five civilians.

A 15-year-old girl died when she was caught in crossfire between rival groups in a street battle typical of the kind plaguing all of Baghdad’s neighborhoods.

Across Baghdad, at least 30 other people, all men, were found shot to death, apparent victims of sectarian violence. Twenty-four additional bodies were discovered in the area around Kut, south of Baghdad. In Mussayib, also to the south of Baghdad, mortars slammed into civilian homes overnight, killing two women and a man, and another man died when a roadside bomb exploded.

Northeast of Baghdad, in volatile Diyala province, an effort by U.S. and Iraqi forces to flush out Sunni insurgents led to three more deaths among American forces. The soldiers died Friday when a blast tore through a house they were searching for weapons, the military said.

That brought to 36 the number of American troops killed in the first 10 days of February, representing one of the highest daily death rates since the war’s start in March 2003. At least 3,120 service members have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Hundreds of U.S. and Iraqi forces mounted an offensive last month in Diyala, which hugs the Iranian border and which the military says is a hotbed of Sunni Muslim extremists with ties to al-Qaida. The leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in June in Diyala, a region so notorious for insurgent attacks that Iraqi forces have refused to venture into much of it without U.S. backing.