Baghdad: Bombs killed 17 people across Iraq's capital on Saturday, including Iranian visitors near a revered shrine and shoppers at a Shiite neighbourhood market, authorities said.
The attacks - several roadside bombs and cars packed with explosives - wounded more than 100 people. Most of the casualties were likely Shiites, a frequent target of Sunni insurgents who have long sought to provoke civil war in Iraq.
Police said the deadliest strike targeted a marketplace in Baiyaa, a Shiite neighbourhood in southwestern Baghdad. A car parked outside a shopping area exploded around midday, killing six people and injuring 42. Hospital officials confirmed the casualties.
An hour earlier, near-simultaneous blasts hit two groups of Iranians near the gold-domed Mousa Al Kadhim mosque in the Shiite neighbourhood of Kadhimiyah, according to security forces. A pair of bombs killed five Iranians resting near the shrine. A car exploded next to a bus carrying Iranians in the nearby Shiite area of Shula, killing another three people.
Police and medical officials said those two attacks wounded 52 people.
Attacks by extremists on Shiite visitors and Iraqi Shiites helped fuel a surge of violence between the two main sects during the height of Iraq's bloodshed between 2005 and 2007, as the insurgency against US forces gave way to sectarian fighting.
Shiites come from all over the world to visit shrines and mosques in Iraq that are revered by Shiites, but the vast majority of the religious tourists are Iranians.
Earlier, police said a roadside bomb targeting a judge's security convoy in downtown Baghdad killed three people, including two guards, and wounded seven passers-by. The judge was not in the convoy as it drove through Karradah, an area of mixed-ethnicity.
All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to brief the media.
